Preface

Abstract

Extract On September 11, 1857, a group of Mormon settlers in southwestern Utah used false promises of protection to coax a party of California-bound emigrants from their encircled wagons and massacre them. The slaughter left the corpses of more than one hundred men, women, and children strewn across a highland valley called the Mountain Meadows. “Since the Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred,” wrote southern Utah historian Juanita Brooks decades later, “we have tried to blot out the affair from our history.” Brooks believed she was doing her church a service by publishing her landmark book, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, in 1950, maintaining “that nothing but the truth can be good enough for the church to which I belong.” Though no official condemnation of her work came from authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, neither did any recognition.1Close Just over fifty years later, historian Will Bagley introduced his own book on the subject, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, with the criticism that “the modern LDS church wishes the world to simply forget the most disturbing episode in its history.”2Close