August 2, 2008, MMM Chuch Newa

LDS Church News Articles,
1857 tragedy examined anew
August 2, 2008
By R. Scott Lloyd
Church News staff writer

[Can published reading Copy of Book
draw on significant new research about
Mountain Meadows Massacre without the
courting of California Archivists?]

A long-awaited book by three LDS authors about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, arguably the most shameful and troubling event in Church History, has now been released and is or shortly will be available in bookstores.

Massacre at Mountain Meadows, published by Oxford University Press, was written by three LDS authors from unprecedented research at Church and other archives.

Massacre at Mountain Meadows, published by Oxford University Press, is the most thoroughly researched — and, some say, the most even-handed — chronicle to date of the Sept. 11, 1857, mass killing in southern Utah, in which local Mormon militia members, aided by Paiute Indians, lured some 120 traveling emigrants from their encampment and slaughtered them, including women and older children, leaving only a few younger children as survivors.
In preparation nearly seven years, the book is the work of Richard E. Turley Jr., Glen M. Leonard and Ronald W. Walker. Brother Turley, assistant Church Historian, was managing director of the Church Historical Department while the book was being written. Brother Leonard, now retired, was director of the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City. Brother Walker, now an independent historian, was a professor in the BYU History Department.

"We began our book at the end of 2001," the authors wrote in the preface "with the decision that ours would not be primarily a response to prior historical writing — to the arguments or conclusions of any previous author. Rather, we would take a fresh approach based upon every primary source we could find."

The quest took them and Historical Department colleagues not only to sources in the Church's history library and archives — including the archives of the First Presidency — but to "every promising archive in the country."

"Church leaders supported our book by providing full and open disclosure," the authors affirmed in the preface.

Collection of material became, they say, "an embarrassment of riches," with too much for a single book, leading to the reluctant decision that a second volume will be necessary in the future.

"Besides, two narrative themes emerged," they wrote. "One dealt with the story of the massacre and the other with its aftermath — one with crime and the other with punishment. This first volume tells only the first half of the story, leaving the second half to another day."

Motivating the authors, they say, was a desire to foster increasing cooperation and understanding between descendants of both perpetrators and victims of the massacre, Church leaders, Utah state officials and other institutions and individuals.

"Only complete and honest evaluation of the tragedy can bring the trust necessary for lasting good will," the preface reads. "Only then can there be catharsis."

In writing the book, the authors said, they sought to answer the question, "How can basically good people commit such a terrible atrocity?" In a 231-page narrative, supplemented by some 200 pages of appendices, notes and other ancillary material, the authors detail the complicated web of events leading up to the tragedy and enlist scholarly literature on 19th century violence to help answer the question.
In so doing they identified three social factors that often lead to mass killing and that were present in the massacre at Mountain Meadows: the tendency of most ordinary people to allow the dictates of "authority" to trump their own moral instincts; peer-group conformity and dehumanization of the victims.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre, they wrote, was about "the complex web of fear, misunderstanding, and retribution that prepares normally decent people to kill. Most everything fit the scholarly pattern: The settlers began to see the emigrants as the 'other' or enemy, believing the outsiders somehow threatened the values and well-being of the Mormon community. Rumors circulated that were untrue or enlarged beyond proportion, and southern Utah society was vulnerable to this excitement.

The region was isolated from Salt Lake City. Mixed signals floated down the trail about Indian and emigrant policy. Civil, religious and military power was dangerously held in the hands of a few."

All of this took place against a backdrop of wartime hysteria in which settlers in Utah Territory were alarmed by the advance of a force of army soldiers from the East, sent out by the president of the United States who mistakenly believed the Mormon settlers were in a state of rebellion. The settlers in Utah saw this as yet another instance of a long train of religious persecution they had endured since the Church's founding in New York in 1830.

Pledging to go wherever the research would take them, the authors ended up contradicting claims by previous writers that Brigham Young instigated the massacre. The author of one book , for example, concluded that a policy of resistance in response to the advance of the U.S. army force on the territory amounted to President Young ordering the Indian allies specifically to attack the wagon train at Mountain Meadows.

"But neither chronology nor unfolding events confirm such a charge," the authors remark in their new book. "Young's invitation for Indians to take cattle was a generalized war policy, not an order to massacre the Arkansas company."

E-mail to: rscott@desnews.com