Disgusting? Yes. Embarrassing? Yes.
Inexcusable? Yes.
And yet…
Mormons have been hated for 200 years. Truth be told, they are pretty easy to mock. It’s a mystery
to me how anyone can seriously believe their religion’s nonsense. If you’ve
seen The Book of Mormon play, or listened to its soundtrack, you’ve got
a fair summary of their kooky history and beliefs. One might be excused for
thinking that Mormons have brought on themselves some of their never-ending persecution.
It was, for example, Brigham Young,
himself, the second president of the Mormon church, who was personally responsible
for one of the most horrific mass murders in American history (more on that,
later).
But regardless, why single out Mormons?
(And at a football game, of all places. BTW, the Ducks beat BYU,
41-20.) Is their religion any crazier, or any more blood-stained, than any
other religion? Like Catholicism, for example. But can you imagine opposing fans at a Notre Dame
football game chanting, “Fuck the Catholics!”?
What is it about Mormon theology that makes
it such an easy target? Is it the magic underwear? Secret handshakes? Sister
wives? The belief that Jesus came to America right after his resurrection to
visit the Nephites… (long story)? Or that when Jesus returns, he will first go
to Jerusalem, then to Missouri (site of the Garden of Eden, per Mormon belief)?
If you’re a good Christian, you
probably read right past that “resurrection” part. And the “Jesus returns”
part. You take those supernatural things to be true. Fundaments of your faith. But
really. Is all that Son of God stuff any more or less realistic than an angel named
Moroni coming to upstate New York, in 1823, to visit Joseph Smith, and tell him
where mysterious golden plates were buried, which Smith turned into the Book
of Mormon? And inform him that he had been chosen by God as the one guy in all the world to
restore His true church on Earth?
Every religion has its myths. The ones
from ancient times, however, somehow appear easier to accept than those of more recent
origin.
Take Scientology, which seems
especially wacky, since it was dreamed up just 70 years ago by a science-fiction
writer, L. Ron Hubbard, in Camden, New Jersey. Scientology’s story about the “frozen
thetans of Xenu” is insane, but is it any loonier than the Genesis story of
Adam and Eve and a talking snake, which many Christians believe absolutely?
Legions of Biblical literalists each
year visit a “replica” of Noah’s ark, just off I‑75, in Kentucky. And you can
charter a raft trip through the Grand Canyon with “experts” explaining how that
six-million-year-old chasm was created by Noah’s flood, just a few thousand
years ago. How can seemingly intelligent people believe such malarkey?
It was in 1830 that Joseph Smith’s hallucinogenic
writings and ravings founded the Mormon religion – today’s Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, which now defines life for millions of its adherents.
LDS members take Smith’s Book of Mormon as seriously as Evangelical
Christians take the Bible.
June 2022 – the
Utah Outback
These were some of the mysteries I
pondered, the night before visiting Mountain Meadows, site of Brigham Young’s terrorist
atrocity, committed by his God-fearing followers 165 years ago, a few miles to
the west. I had pulled off the dirt road, once used by pioneer wagon trains bound
for California, to camp in southwest Utah’s high desert.
It’s a forlorn landscape of sagebrush
and scattered junipers. In the howling wind, a somberness infused the air. Perhaps that was just my imagination, chilled by bedtime reading of the
gruesome details of the Mountain Meadows massacre.
In 1857, a wagon train of well-to-do
Arkansas pioneers crossed here, carrying some 40 men, 30 women, and 70 children, and
all their worldly possessions, along with their mules, horses, and an enormous
herd of 100 oxen and at least 800 cattle. Passing the very spot where I had
stopped, they hurried to set up camp a few miles down the road, in an alpine
valley – the remote, rich grasslands known as Mountain Meadows. This was, and
is, Mormon country, and the Arkansas travelers had entered their land in a time
of unprecedented political and religious paranoia and rumors. War between the
fiercely-independent Mormons and the U.S. government was in the air. The
Arkansas wagon train was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For at Mountain Meadows, Mormon
settlers and leaders (aided by Paiute allies), with cold-blooded premeditation,
murdered at least 120 men, women, and children of the wagon train. Their bodies were
left to rot. Only 17 of the youngest children were spared (the ones they
thought wouldn’t remember the killers’ faces), though some were grievously wounded.
This is the odious reality of the
foundations of one of the world’s fastest growing religions – the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Is it any wonder that “Fuck the Mormons!”
remains a living execration today?
In my camp, a beautiful pair of
ash-throated flycatchers gave melodic chirps, flitting about the trees. It was
a cruel contradiction. The birds, of course, were oblivious to the evil history
of this place. Some of the site’s ancient junipers, however, may actually have
witnessed the last happy moments of those pioneer families, passing by here to
their tragic destiny.
The Night before
the Massacre
The night before arriving at Mountain
Meadows, the doomed travelers camped at a meadow and springs a few miles east, farther
back the wagon trail. I learned that from Lisa Michele Church, whose Mormon
ancestors homesteaded on that very spot and built a rustic, log home and barn,
just one year after the massacre. The family’s still-standing Page House was
built there, a generation later, in 1899.
I had stopped to read the historical
markers in front of the fenced-off, boarded-up house. That’s where I met Lisa,
who was doing some cleanup in the dilapidated place that was built by her
ancestors. I asked if she would show me the house’s interior, and she agreed. I
slipped through the heavy iron gate, and learned about her prodigious work to
preserve, and one day hopefully restore, the crumbling, once-elegant mansion.
The thousand-acre property no longer
is owned by her family; they lost it during the 1930s Depression. But Lisa managed to get the current owners to let her work
on the house, including putting on a $7,000 new metal roof, paid for by
proceeds from her remarkable history book Sunlight
and Shadow – The Page Ranch Story.
Seen through Lisa’s eyes, the Page
House was a mansion once more. The dark, vandalized rooms and broken windows disappeared
– instead, fine furniture from Chicago filled the spaces, grand art hung from
walls framed by Victorian woodwork, and peeling, water-stained wallpaper again
took on a luxurious glow.
Lisa’s stories of her Mormon relatives,
including the complicated, polygamist lives of plural wives who had lived here,
came to life, as I listened. These had been her people, her family.
Still, it was hard for me to
understand. Why did she care so much about a place that she didn’t even own?
“I wanted to bring dignity to the
house,” Lisa explained. Moreover, “I will see mother in Heaven one day, and
wanted to have done right by her.”
I told her of my intention to visit
the site of the Mountain Meadows massacre in the morning, but didn't dwell on the topic. It can be a touchy
subject with Mormons; the Church denied any complicity in the massacre for 150
years. Blamed it all on the Indians, or the victims themselves, or more
recently, on renegade, local Mormons.
Historians are split on whether LDS Church
President Brigham Young directly ordered the massacre. Here’s the conclusion
that I believe:
“[W]ithin
the context of the era and the history of Brigham Young’s complete
authoritarian control over his domain and his followers, it is inconceivable
that a crime of this magnitude could have occurred without direct orders from
him. Virtually every federal officer who became involved in future
investigations of the massacre would conclude that Young personally ordered the
atrocity, used his position to shield the killers who had followed his
instructions, and personally directed the elimination of all evidence incriminating
himself and his closest advisors. The evidence of Young as an ‘accessory after
the fact’ is abundant, though documentation of his earlier role as orchestrator
of the massacre is elusive.” (Denton 2003:152)
Not to this day have LDS officials
accepted responsibility for the massacre. The closest has been an expression of
“profound regret.” Why not apologize? To do so, I believe, might open the
Church to demands for reparations to the ancestors of the Arkansas families
they destroyed, and the generations of trauma they caused. You know the saying:
follow the money. The LDS Church, one of the richest in the world, owns $100
billion in investments.
Camping that night, just off the
pioneer trail, it was easy to imagine the Arkansas wagon train passing by, the
sounds of creaking wagons, mooing of cattle, laughter of children, the hurried
commands of men anxious to pass through the land of Mormons who hated them for
no apparent reason.
But maybe that enmity is not that
hard to understand. The Mormons, intent on carving out their Zion on Earth in
the Utah wilderness, had been persecuted for their bizarre beliefs wherever
they had settled. In fact, a beloved Mormon elder (Mitt
Romney’s great-great-grandfather) had
just been murdered back in Arkansas (a polygamy love triangle gone bad). Church
leaders, led by Young, had made it clear that outsiders were to be feared as a
threat to their peculiar religion and to the very survival of their unconventional
way of life.
When I drifted to sleep, I
felt tormented by the insanity and gruesome details of the Mormons’ cruelty (reminiscent of Christians’ bloody Crusades a millennium earlier). And haunted
by the evils conducted by otherwise normal men in the name of God, religion,
and in this case, their nutty prophet, Joseph Smith.
The First
September 11th
It was early Sunday morning when I
reached Mountain Meadows. Sites of the atrocities, and their memorials, are
spread over several miles of grassy meadows. I walked alone down the paths to
spots where the unspeakable actions took place over several days in 1857,
culminating with the Arkansas wagon train finally surrendering, only to be
slaughtered, one-by-one, face-to-face, in an orgy of butchery and bloodshed.
Men, women, little children. Shot, stabbed, clubbed, throats sliced. Bodies stripped naked, robbed,
heaped in piles, and left for wolves, coyotes, and vultures. “Lord my God,
Receive their spirits. It is for Thy Kingdom that I do this,” one of the
killers prayed to his God, as he fired his gun into defenseless humans.
Those Arkansans got
caught in a larger battle by Mormons against the federal government. Brigham
Young, the Mormon President as well as Utah Territory Governor, had trumpeted,
“Any President of the United States who lifts his finger against [my] people
shall die an untimely death and go to hell!” Young railed against the
tyrannical federal government infringing on their rights (e.g., polygamy; Young
had at least 56 wives).
The end times were
nearing, Mormons believed, with the overthrow of the U.S. government assured,
when their one-and-only true church would rule the globe. To that end, “lying
for the Lord” was righteous. The end justified the means. Sometimes, even including
murder.
The West in the 1850s
was a violent place. LDS “prophets,” however, took that culture of violence to
another level. Brigham Young thundered that “blood atonement” was demanded for
sinners who had committed unpardonable sins; meaning, they must be killed in
order to save their eternal souls: “[Sinners should] beg of their brethren to
shed their blood.” One of the “unpardonable sins” was apostasy – leaving the
Mormon faith and abandoning unquestioning allegiance to Young.
U.S.
President James Buchanan had declared the Mormons in Utah Territory to be in
rebellion. Federal troops were headed to Salt Lake City to oust Young as
territorial governor.
In the month before the massacre, Young had travelled with his adopted son, John D. Lee, to his southern Utah settlements, fanning the hot August fires of paranoia among the faithful. The Second Coming of Jesus was fast approaching, he preached, as was war with the U.S. Army. Lee told Young that his local Mormon neighbors (in the Mountain Meadows region) were “anxious to avenge the blood of the Prophets.” The upshot was that Lee and other local Mormon leaders were certain that Young, their Living Prophet, had commanded them to kill every emigrant passing through Utah.
Blind obedience to Mormon authority was (and is) a central tenet of LDS theology. To disobey a church prophet (i.e., Brigham Young) is to rebel against God, with unimaginable consequences.
And so, with the Arkansas wagon train headed their way, the Mormon militia was called up and plans detailed to enlist Paiute allies and wipe out the emigrants. In the nearly-full-moon-lit darkness of Sunday night, September 6, 1857, Lee and his men donned warpaint to disguise themselves as Indians. As the emigrants were waking and having breakfast of quail and rabbit, in the gray, dawn light, the slaughter began. The Mormons’ first shot killed a child.
The emigrants who survived the initial half-hour assault were surrounded, without access to water or firewood, and a siege ensued for five days, with periodic attacks.
Finally, on September 11 under the Mormon militia’s diabolical use of a white flag, the surviving emigrants surrendered, and they were lined up. The order was given: “Do your duty!” Amid the murderous horrors of gunshots, screams, and wailing, rapes were likely.
Eyewitness accounts of the bloodbath
at Mountain Meadows, those crimes against humanity, are nauseating to read,
even after all these years later.
“[Wagon
train] Captain Jack Baker held four-year-old Nancy Huff in his arms as he was
killed; the little girl then watched her mother ‘shot in the forehead and fall
dead.’ She looked on helplessly as teenage girls begged their murderers to
spare them, to no avail. Vina, ‘the prettiest of the three Baker girls,’ was
last seen by one of her sisters being led away, her beautiful long black hair
hanging straight. One eyewitness reported ‘children clinging around the knees
of the murderers, begging for mercy and offering themselves as slaves for life
could they be spared. But their throats were cut from ear to ear as an answer
to their appeal.’ Another witness reported that two attractive young girls were
told that if they danced nude their lives would be spared, yet after doing the
macabre performance they too were put to death. ‘You don’t forget the horror,’
one of the survivors said. ‘And you wouldn’t forget it either, if you saw your
own mother topple over in the wagon beside you, with a big red splotch getting
bigger and bigger on the front of her calico dress.’” (Denton 2003:138)
Before the week’s atrocities ended, at least 100 Mormon men from across southern Utah (half of the entire region’s adult white men), and 50-100 Paiute Indians, had been in the fight.
The Aftermath
Brigham Young and the
LDS church immediately denied any role in the massacre and orchestrated a
massive coverup of the Mormon role. Oaths of silence were sworn by the killers.
Young demanded written evidence of LDS complicity destroyed. Apostates who
dared speak out were ostracized, terrorized, and sometimes, killed.
Only one Mormon leader
ever was brought to legal justice – John D. Lee – and not until two decades
after the massacre.
I first learned of Lee’s
story from my adventures rafting the Grand Canyon, which embark from a spot
just below the Glen Canyon Dam, called Lee’s Ferry. It was here, 14 years after
the massacre, that Brigham Young exiled his favored, adopted son, to
hide out and operate a ferry across the Colorado River, in one of the most
deserted places in Utah Territory.
In years immediately
after the massacre, however, Lee had become the richest man in southern Utah, blessed
with multiple wives, children, land, and power, due to his connections with
Young, his unrepentant life, and a good share of the loot stolen from the
murdered pioneers. He was a respected LDS church elder. Though shunned by
some in the Mormon community, not by all.
During my private tour of the Page House, I had asked Lisa about John Lee, since her ancestors had homesteaded the property shortly after the nearby massacre. She told me that Lee had been a close friend of the ranch's original patriarch, Robert Richey, her great-great-great grandfather, and had visited the homestead often. Lee’s diary notes that he visited the Richeys just six months after the massacre and “catechised” and re-baptized the entire family.
Lee also records another visit, several years after, when he “preached to them the gospel and exhorted [Richey] to ... never swerve from his duty because others done wrong" (italics added). Was Richey questioning his church leaders because of what had been "done wrong" down the road at Mountain Meadows? Whatever the true story, in 1869 he was excommunicated from the Mormon faith "for unbelief," a devastating blow to his entire family, particularly since it appears that the charge was wrong.
Robert Richey had devoted his life to the LDS church. After his conversion to Mormonism in 1842, at the age of 36, he gave up a life in Indiana as a schoolteacher with one wife, in exchange for a hardscrabble life preaching to Indians in the remote desert mountains of southern Utah with (eventually) three wives.
Lisa in her book said that her ancestor was a man "who thought deeply and felt strongly." I have to believe that such a man could not have ignored the immoralities of the massacre and his church's coverup of the crimes. Is that why he was excommunicated by his beloved religion, his family ostracized by the LDS church and its members, despite the Richeys' devotion.
I've seen no evidence that Robert Richey was involved in the massacre. In any event, he would not have had the option of being neutral regarding its perpetrators, including his friend, John Lee. After all, Richey's home was one of the closest neighbors to Mountain Meadows. He certainly would have known the truth about the massacre and Lee's role.
How had this monster, Lee, lived and traveled among his Mormon brethren, when everyone in Utah knew he was
a primary organizer and leader of the mass murders? Treating him as a man of God, hosting
him in their homes, and accepting his sermonizing? Letting him baptize their
families?
It’s conceivable that at least some felt they had no
choice. Lee was brash, sanctimonious, tyrannical, and the adopted son of the
Prophet, himself. A bully. Possibly a sexual predator. Maybe no one in southern
Utah could say “no” to Lee. Besides, he was known as a medical and spiritual
healer, and was a compelling storyteller; his lies about the massacre were
still being argued by his descendants well into the 1930s.
Following the massacre, no Mormons
admitted to a role in the bloodshed. But in the close-knit,
cult-like LDS culture, virtually every person in
southern Utah had had some connection to the atrocity. Dozens of men had
committed murder; all had families and friends who supported them and shared
their vile secrets.
Who among the faithful
in southern Utah were without sin? After the massacre, residents from nearby
Cedar City and elsewhere had converged on the macabre scene to loot and steal.
The wagon train had been relatively wealthy, carrying supplies and cash for the
emigrants’ new lives in California. Corpses were stripped for clothing and
shoes; fingers amputated for rings; wagons and carriages appropriated; every
item of value went to someone, and the Church took its share. The 17 surviving
children were doled out to local Mormons, even to some, including Lee, who had murdered
their families. Federal troops two years later gathered the traumatized children
and returned them to relatives in Arkansas.
Twenty months after the
massacre, Army soldiers came to Mountain Meadows to bury the remains of the dead
Arkansas pioneers. It was grisly duty. One reported that he filled “a two
bushel basket of women’s hair that was strewn around among the sage brush.”
Over a mass burial site, they erected a stone cairn, 12-feet high, and
assembled a 24-feet high cross. Inscribed was: “Vengeance is mine: I will
repay, saith the Lord.”
Two years later, in
1861, Brigham Young, and an entourage of 60, visited the site. Wearing a heavy
overcoat against the springtime chill, he walked up to the cross and studied
the inscription. His voice boomed out: “Vengeance is mine and I have taken a
little.” He raised his right fist to the sky – the signal of his Mormon vigilantes. The men knew what he wanted done; he didn’t need to say it aloud. They
quickly destroyed the cross and scattered the cairn’s stones.
Despite the enormity of
their terrorist crimes, nearly everyone escaped legal accountability. Brigham
Young and the church stood up to the feds, lied and blamed the Indians, and
only one person, Lee, was ever punished for the atrocity. Not any church
elders. And certainly not Brigham Young.
Young masterfully
delayed and thwarted all efforts at justice for decades. Yet the festering
story of the Mountain Meadows massacre refused to die. As his “blame the
Indians” account became untenable, he decided to blame Lee as the scapegoat.
So, in 1870, he excommunicated Lee, then banished him to today’s Lee’s Ferry.
With the ponderous wheels of federal justice finally turning, Lee and eight
others were indicted, 17 years after their murderous fury.
Young stage-managed Lee’s
trial, manufacturing
evidence, coercing witnesses, suborning perjury, bankrolling Lee’s defense –
all leading to a deadlocked jury. Lee walked free, as Young had demanded, but
not for long.
The trial had captivated the Nation. Not
until the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in the 1930s and the OJ murders in the 1990s
would Americans be so universally transfixed by every detail of a trial. Few
outside the Mormon communities doubted that Young was responsible for the mass
murders.
So Young orchestrated a new federal trial
for Lee, one in which Lee would be convicted, in order to deflect
blame from himself and the LDS church. It worked, though the public largely saw
Young’s complicity for what it was. With Young’s direction, the second jury convicted
Lee of murder.
As for the dozens of other killers, not
one was ever brought to trial. Nevertheless, the event left an indelible stain on the LDS Church
and its believers. However much the perpetrators and their accomplices denied
their involvement in the massacre, for the rest of their lives, they had to
live with the nightmares of their sins. Some died in spiritual torment.
I found meager solace at
the site of Lee’s execution, in the same Mountain Meadows fields of his
atrocities. It’s the place where he sat on his coffin, awaiting the firing
squad, loyal to his Prophet and religion to the end.
And what of the Indians who shared in
the slaughter?
“Mormon descendants of participants number in the
hundreds of thousands if not millions, and even the children who survived the
massacre often left large families, but the Paiute bands that were lured into
the killings have vanished.” (Bagley 2002:343).
Conclusion
Bigotry is bigotry. It’s but a short
walk down Fanatic Lane from the Oregon Ducks fans shouting “Fuck the
Mormons!” to tiki-carrying neo-Nazis in Virginia chanting “Jews will not
replace us!” It’s an even shorter stroll to the MAGA morons screaming “Lock
her up!” and “Hang Mike Pence!”
We navigate a world filled with all
manner of bigotry, hatred, and ignorance. America’s history is rife with bloodshed,
tragedy, and injustice. Religion plays a central role in much of that history,
and in today’s cultural polarization.
In a country in which one of America’s
richest, fastest-growing religions refuses to honestly confront its wicked history at Mountain Meadows, where its adherents cling to myths and lies and
wishful thinking, how can Mormons expect to find the respect and tolerance they
preach to others?
Mormons today explain away their inconvenient history, as Mitt Romney did in 2007: "There are bad people in any church and it's true of members of my church, too." They refuse to acknowledge the terrible responsibility of their church and its leaders for the massacre and its coverup.
I’ve visited other American killing
fields – Gettysburg, Richmond, Antietam, Manassas, Wounded Knee, Little Bighorn. None
affected me as deeply as walking the languid grasslands of Mountain Meadows.
This mass murder of 120 fellow Americans by Mormons was done in their God’s name. What sort of God countenances such evil?
Could those heinous acts have been committed
by the same Utah Mormons that I’ve passed in the aisles of Lin’s Market in Cedar City. Are they the same nice, family-loving, God-fearing citizens as their kin from another era? After
all, a decade after the massacre, John Higbee, one of the leading murderers, was
elected mayor of Cedar City; until his death in 1904, he professed his
innocence and blamed the Indians.
On the surface, it may seem like there was no justice for the Mountain Meadows massacre. Only John D. Lee was executed, 19 years after his crimes. But who suffered more for their sins – Lee, who coolly joked with his firing squad? Or the men and women who had to live with their guilt, and the ghastly images of their own role, every hour of every day for a lifetime?
I suspect that few Mormons, today,
give much thought to that long-ago massacre. They may be ignorant or just accept their church's rationalizations. But not all. Some must recognize the awful burden of their
religion’s legacy.
How could ancestors of
the assassins of Mountain Meadows not be haunted by the horrors
hiding in their families’ pasts? Knowing with certainty, or even suspecting, that
their relatives played a role in the killing of innocents must be terrible. That painful guilt, however, is itself a form
of justice -- delayed but not denied.
And what of the LDS church, never
convicted of its responsibility for the infamous massacre? To this day, it bears
shame and guilt for its wretched, blood-stained history. And a well-deserved stigma on its reputation.
So, “Fuck the Mormons!"? No, I
think not, despite my revulsion with their history and their ridiculous canons.
Because at least when it comes to the Mountain Meadows massacre,
the Mormons pretty well fucked themselves.
# # #
References
American
Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows,
September 1857. Sally Denton. 2003.
Blood of the
Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Will Bagley. 2002.
Massacre at
Mountain Meadows. Ronald W.
Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr., Glen M. Leonard. 2008.
Sunlight and Shadow: The Page Ranch Story. Lisa Michele Church. 2017.
# # #
I wrote briefly about the Mountain
Meadows massacre six years ago, in a blog about the takeover of a national
wildlife refuge in Oregon by right-wing militants:
Here's a collection of my stories, also available on Apple Books and Smashwords. Free.
# # #
