Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows

by Will Bagley

Book Overview

The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the thirty-year history of the Oregon and California trails. Yet it has been all but forgotten. Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets is an award-winning, riveting account of the attack on the Baker-Fancher wagon train by Mormons in the local militia and a few Paiute Indians. Based on extensive investigation of the events surrounding the murder...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806136391
• ISBN13: 9780806136394
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 493 Pages
• Weight: 2.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.0" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

Great book on the Mountan Meadow Massacre

This book is a must read for anyone that wants to be more informed on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. There are a few books out there on the Massacre, but in my opinion this is the best. It is important to realize that Bagley certainly does have a bias and presents much of his own personal opinion in this work. That said, he has done an immense amount of research on the subject and I believe that he knows more about the Massacre than any other single historian out there. He also gives Juanita Brooks her due because she was the first to do a published work on the Massacre under immense scrutiny from the church. While I don't necessarily agree with some of Bagley's opinions concerning who was ultimately responsible of the Massacre, his opinion should be carefully considered. Overall this book was a very readable book and Bagley's sources and footnotes are incredible. I highly recommend it.

A fair account

I really take exception to some of the mindless reviews of this book posted here. There's no denying that Bagley has personal biases. Yet he has portrayed the event in a fair manner. Bagley's work does a number of things to build upon and hone the work begun by Juanita Brooks, namely: 1) Brings further attention to the unjustified defamation of the Fancher and Baker parties by Utah Mormons. 2) Implicates Brigham Young to a greater extent. 3) Casts John D. Lee in a more balanced light as both a willing participant and a scapegoat. 4) In the spirit of Juanita Brooks, makes the point that the LDS church needs to accept ultimate responsibility and reap the consequences, both positive and negative. The LDS church has not yet found its moment of honesty as to the MMM, although some church leaders are making limited progress in that area. 5) Puts the Paiute's involved in their likely mercenary role as determined by the evidence. 6) Catches the reader up on the most recent developments in mountain meadows preservation. I'm a Mormon, but I can't deny that Brigham Young most likely wanted to rattle some cages by encouraging an indian attack on the Fancher wagon train. Brigham, as somewhat of a religious fanatic (for good and for bad, let the chips fall where they may) is as culpable as sin in setting up the perfect storm for 120 men, women, and children to be slaughtered in cold blood by obedience-driven Mormons already spooked by the horrors of being driven out of their homes and into the Rocky Mountains. In the midst of the impending apocalypse, with the fresh death of Parley P. Pratt, with federal troops bearing down on Deseret, Brigham had no qualms with showing the gentiles that Deseret was unsafe by unloading on an emmigrant wagon train, as long as the natives could take the blame. He had nothing against the natives that wasn't couched in faith; they were just filling their place in LDS theology as the "battle-axe of the Lord" (please read the Book of Mormon for details) and he was simply helping them fulfill their manifest destiny. I find one fact particularly telling. If Brigham and co. felt so bad about the massacre, why didn't he order the immigrants to be given a proper, respectful burial? Instead, the Mormons placed a light coating of dirt over the victims, knowing it wouldn't protect them from scavengers, and basically let 100 dead emmigrants rot out in the open for a few years before the U.S. army arrived on the scene and gave the victims a proper burial. In between that time Mormons visited the site on multiple occasions and were aghast at the corpses with locks of hair rotting away on the meadow. Sickening. That is one hell of a smoking gun right there. Not to mention the well-documented deliberate cover-up. If Brigham was not involved, then he certainly had nothing to hide. Again, all the evidence says he's guilty as hell, prophet and all. As much as the LDS church is a positive force in the world, it also has

A Massacre, The Controversy, and an Authoratative History

On 11 September 1857, a wagon train traveling from Arkansas and headed to California, was ambushed in a valley in Southwestern Utah. The Mountain Meadows Massacre involved the slaughter of 120 men, women, and children, and although the technology of massacres has now far overtaken it, it was one of the worst mass murders in US History. No one disputes these facts, but there is a good deal of dispute about the details. _Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows_ (University of Oklahoma Press) by Will Bagley, who writes for the _Salt Lake Tribune_, gives details, but since the book demonstrates the involvement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the massacre, it will be a controversial effort. Bagley shows, however, that the church has long campaigned to keep details of the massacre hidden, and he gives documentation that the reason for this is that leaders of the church provoked the killings and members of the church committed them. Even though stories of Mormon complicity in the massacre were present immediately afterwards, and have been demonstrated by historians in this century, the church has continued to deny culpability. The deniers will have to contend with this big, well documented book. It cannot close the issue forever; one of the lessons of Bagley's history is that history itself can never be fully written. This is to the chagrin of Mormon leaders. At a memorial ceremony in 1999, president of the church Gordon B. Hinckley declared that it was "time to leave the entire matter in the hands of God" and ordered: "Let the book of the past be closed." Fat chance.Bagley knows what he is up against. The fate of the Fancher party's wagon train from Arkansas until its doom can only be reconstructed from problematic reports: "Almost every acknowledged 'fact' about the fate of these murdered people is open to question." However, Bagley has firmly placed the massacre within larger church history. He demonstrates why the Mormon leaders viewed the presence of Arkansans going through the state as an outrage against them. He shows how they were already expecting a showdown by the US Army because of their famous polygamy, their refusal to install a reliable court system, and Brigham Young's tendency to make pronouncements like "I live above the law and so do this people." When the Fancher party passed from Salt Lake City into the impoverished southern Utah, interpreters were available to rally the Indians, and the book gives evidence that Young himself had encouraged the Indians to seize the valuable stock of the well-supplied wagon train. Various church officials of the region organized the Indians, and painted themselves up to look like Indians; this happened without a doubt, though church officials will disagree that it happened to the extent that Bagley has well documented. All, saving some children under seven years old, were slaughtered in separate scenes of bloody chaos. The quest

Blood of the Propehts a worthy read

This book should be read by anyone interested in Western Americana and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.Bagley has performed yeoman service with his treatment of the tragedy at Mountain Meadows. His research has opened important opportunities for objective evaluation. Important new material includes, among other sources, both Brigham Young's encouragement to the Paiutes to attack immigrant wagon trains and John Hawley's memoirs of Mormon attitudes immediately after the attack in the southern counties of Utah Territory. Although Hawley denies that he participated in the massacre, the evidence seems credible that two of his brothers were at the scene as was Hawley, no later than the afternoon of the slaughter of the prisoners.Recent forensic evidence on immigrant remains brings into doubt the charge that the Paiutes killed the majority of women and children, as been stated by various Mormon sources. Point-blank gunshot wounds to bodies of women, children, and infants point to the Mormon militia being far more active in the killings and contradicts their statements they killed only the men and older boys.Whether Brigham Young actively ordered the wagon train's destruction remains circumstantial. However, his behavior at the time provides a basis for his indictment at the very least on grounds of conspiracy and failure of leadership. The real question remains: "Would priesthood holders in Southern Utah destroy a wagon train of non-believers without Young's explicit approval?" Any serious student of LDS history knows the answer.

Laying the blame at Brigham's feet

For years the slaughter of the Fancher wagon train at Mountain Meadows in southern Utah has been a point of contention for the Mormon Church. Who is to blame? According to the official version of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormon John D. Lee was the primary villain who, as the lone scapegoat, paid for his crime when he was executed in 1877. Although the massacre had been discussed in "anti-Mormon" books, it was a loyal Mormon by the name of Juanita Brooks who bravely penned "The Mountain Meadows Massacre" in 1950. Her book created a firestorm by giving credible reasons to believe that several Mormons in high positions were, in fact, responsible for the tragic event of September 11, 1857. Now a new book by historian Will Bagley is going to cause the Mormon Church even more consternation as he attempts to lay blame for the massacre directly at the feet of second LDS President Brigham Young. This was a theory privately held by Brooks, but she could not prove this at the time of her book. On page 363 Bagley writes, "A historian's professional and personal conclusions often differ, as was the case with Brooks' final assignment of responsibility for the massacre at Mountain Meadows. In the last revision of her book, she stressed the importance of Young's manipulation of the Indian leaders and the military orders placing `each man where he was to do his duty.' She retained her original conclusion that the existing evidence did not prove that Brigham Young and George A. Smith specifically order the massacre, but it showed they `set up social conditions that made it possible.' In a private letter to Roger B. Mathison of the University of Utah Library, she went much further: she had `come to feel that Brigham Young was directly responsible for the tragedy.' John D. Lee, she believed, would make it to heaven before Brigham Young." Bagley states, "Claiming that Brigham Young had nothing to do with Mountain Meadows is akin to arguing that Abraham Lincoln had nothing to do with the Civil War" (p. 379). He discounts the vilification of the Arkansas immigrants/victims as nothing but lies perpetrated by the murderers themselves. Bagley recognizes the complicated events leading up to the tragic event, but he makes it clear that one cannot overlook the fact that this was an act to avenge the blood of Mormon apostle Parley P. Pratt who was killed in May of 1857 by the legal husband of his 12th wife, Eleanor McLean, in Arkansas. Bagley's "smoking gun" (?) is the journal of Dimick Huntington, a source never seen by Brooks. Huntington recorded a meeting that Young had with local Indians on September 1, 1857 where he agreed to give the emigrants' cattle to the Indians. Says Bagley, "He [Young] encouraged his Indian allies to attack the Fancher party to make clear to the nation the cost of war with the Mormons" (p. 379).Bagley's book is a must read for anyone who wants to get beyond the LDS Church spin on this very thorny issue. Mormon Church histor