In 1990, 28 miles north of St. George off Utah Highway 18, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the state of Utah, along with descendants of the victims, dedicated a major monument to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The memorial is a broad tablet of white granite made of several panels set into a hillside above a valley. Although it has many words, none say who put it up. In fact, no words tell who did anything; the key verb is in the passive voice:
It's not that historians are in the dark. Years before the monument went up, Juanita Brooks examined the event closely in her book The Mountain Meadows Massacre. She concluded as have others that Latter-day Saints did it with help from their Paiute allies. In the words of historian Kenneth Foote, the Mountain Meadows Massacre was "the most shameful event in Mormon history," murdering more "gentiles" than all the Mormons killed by gentiles along the entire path of their exodus from New York through Missouri and Illinois to Utah. Latter-day Saints still dominate Utah however, especially southwest Utah. Hence the passive voice.
It is lamentable that the church and civic leaders who organized what proved to be a memorable reunion between descendants of attackers and victims in 1990 could not bring themselves to be more candid on the landscape. When coupled with the passive voice, the term "massacre," while perfectly appropriate, guarantees that most tourists will infer that Native Americans did the grisly work. Across the United States historic markers and monuments use "massacre" when Native Americans kill European Americans, even when as few as one white died! Utah alone has at least five historical markers that use "massacre" for Indian attacks and none for any white attack (1). Latter-day Saints know this. According to historian Will Bagley, "There is a perverse and persistent attempt in Utah history to lay the blame for this atrocity on the Paiutes, but as Nephi Johnson, who led the slaughter of the women and children, confessed, 'white men did most of the killing.'"
How did it happen that Latter-day Saints, themselves European American pioneers, would engage in the mass slaughter of other European American pioneers? To understand this event we need to examine the prickly relations between the Mormon Church hierarchy, which was also the government of Utah Territory, and the United States in 1857.
For eight years, beginning with the 1849 California gold rush, Mormon settlers in Utah had hosted emigrants from the East. Often the relationship was mutually beneficial: wagon trains got new oxen and supplies, and Mormons got household valuables not likely to make it over the mountains to California. But often the relationship was acrimonious: Mormons abused emigrants from Missouri and Illinois in revenge for having themselves been mistreated in those states, and wagon trains drove their cattle through Mormon towns and farms without regard for damages caused while trespassing. When disputes went to court, the judicial system inflamed rather than settled the quarrels because non-Mormons felt they received no justice from Mormon judges and juries.
Most Americans have no idea that among the official actions of the United States Army is the Utah War or Utah Expedition of 1857-58. The Buchanan administration was upset that many federal appointees in Utah Territory -- judges and Indian agents -- found it impossible to function in the theocracy that Brigham Young had created. The army took its campaign quite seriously. To an even greater extent, so did the Latter-day Saints. According to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism,
A large contingent of United States troops was marching westward toward Utah Territory in the summer of 1857. Despite having been the federally appointed territorial governor, Brigham Young was not informed by Washington of the army's purpose and interpreted the move as a renewal of the persecution the Latter-day Saints had experienced before their westward hegira. "We are invaded by a hostile force who are evidently assailing us to accomplish our overthrow and destruction," he proclaimed on August 5, 1857. Anticipating an attack, he declared the territory to be under martial law and ordered "[t]hat all the forces in said Territory hold themselves in readiness to March, at a moment's notice, to repel any and all such threatened invasion."Young, head of the Mormon Church, preached on the need for Mormons to declare independence from the United States and ordered Latter-day Saints not to sell "gentiles" a grain of wheat. He even made contingency plans to abandon and burn Salt Lake City and evacuate to the mountains.
Into this cauldron of suspicion came the unfortunate Fancher party en route from Arkansas to California. These emigrants were hardly diplomatic. Mormons refused to sell them supplies, so they "boasted of what they would do when the army came to set these people straight," according to Brooks. Mormons claimed that some in the Fancher group bragged about being in the mobs that had run the Saints out of Missouri. Probably they hadn't (2), but these were explosive words in Utah. Latter-day Saint leaders had also been talking with nearby Paiutes, inflaming them to be allies with them against the United States. When the Fancher emigres camped at Mountain Meadows to get their livestock ready for the trek across the dry lands to the west, the Indians and Mormons attacked. The initial assault killed several on each side; then the Fancher survivors hunkered down behind embankments. Several of them tried to dash for help, but Mormons and Paiutes killed them before they got far.
Then came the massacre. Mormon leaders in southwest Utah determined to wipe out the entire group. On the fifth day of the siege they sent John D. Lee and William Bateman under a white flag to talk with the emigrants. Lee said the Mormons would escort the travelers to safety, but they would have to abandon their cattle and horses to the Indians and give up their arms to the Mormons. Desperate, the pioneers agreed. The young children were put in a wagon and driven ahead along with another wagon carrying two or three wounded men. Women and older children then walked out. Last came the unarmed men, each accompanied by an armed Mormon. "At the command 'Halt! Do your duty!'" Brooks tells, "each Mormon man was to shoot the emigrant at his side, the Natives hiding in the brush were to kill the women and older children, and Lee and the drivers were to finish off the wounded in the wagon." It went according to plan. Most of the Fancher men fell at the first volley. Within in a few minutes it was all over -- except the cover-up.
Brooks established that two local Mormon leaders, Col. W. H. Dame and Lt. Col. I. C. Haight, had ordered the killing. (They had military titles because the Saints had organized a militia.) But the blame may belong at the top: according to historian David A. White, "Brigham Young cannot escape responsibility for setting the stage for the tragedy." His interpreter, apparently speaking for Young, promised the Paiutes the party's cattle in a meeting with Young beforehand, which helped incite them to attack. On the other hand, Young also sent orders to let the emigrants pass without harm, but the directive arrived after the massacre had taken place. Brooks and Bagley show however, that Young ordered and participated in the cover-up.
If the army had kept coming, the United States might have witnessed an attack on a religious sect that would have dwarfed the 1993 assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. (3) But that autumn, the crisis eased. An early snowfall coupled with the Mormons' scorched-earth policies in eastern Utah caused logistical problems for the army. Later, President Buchanan declared the emergency over.
The Latter-day Saints released the orphaned children they had adopted and the United States reunited them with family members back in Arkansas. (4) The Mormon leadership concocted a coverup that blamed the Paiutes, but as the United States established more control over Utah, some Mormon had to be held responsible because too many people knew that whites had been involved in the slaughter. In 1870 the Mormon leadership excommunicated Haight, one of the two men who had ordered the killings, and Lee, who had negotiated the surrender and directed the murders on site. Four years later the church readmitted Haight, but in 1876, after two trials, John D. Lee was sentenced to death. On March 23, 1877, he was shot to death by firing squad at the scene of the crime. Dozens of other church members in southern Utah breathed a sigh of relief when Lee's sacrifice appeased the national cry for justice. For decades the event was simply not talked about openly in southern Utah. Juanita Brooks breached that wall of silence; her courageous research proved that Lee was hardly the only Mormon responsible for the massacre but had been made a scapegoat by the church hierarchy. In 1961, respecting her scholarship, the Latter-day Saints reinstated Lee posthumously, to the relief of his family.
The 1990 monument is in fact the third on the site. In 1859, Maj. James H. Carleton of the United States Army was ordered to investigate the massacre and bury the victims. His report blasted the Mormon perpetrators and tells how his man gathered 34 unburied corpses -- skeletons by then -- and buried them in a mass grave. Above it, his men built a rock cairn fifty feet around and twelve feet high, topped by a twelve-foot cedar cross. Two years later Brigham Young visited the monument and watched as his entourage toppled the cross and destroyed the cairn. United States soldiers rebuilt it a year later, but Mormons tore it down again.
In 1932 the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association and some nearby residents erected a stone marker at this burial site two miles off the highway. It stood until 1990 but was seen by few tourists, who had to brave a steep and narrow track to view it. Although it too used the passive voice and avoided the words "Mormons" or "Latter-day Saints," this marker admitted that the Fancher train "was attacked by white men and Indians." In the 1960s the church bought the site and removed road signs telling of the 1932 marker, making it even harder to find. In 1990 it replaced that 1932 marker with a new one that removes any reference to who did it: "This stone monument marks the burial site for some of those killed in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in September 1857." The new 1990 markers also refers to the very first monument and states that it "was not maintained" -- a passive-voice euphemism for "Mormons tore it down."
The truth about Mountain Meadows has long been available on the landscape -- not just in Utah. In Harrison, Arkansas, where the Fancher train began its trek, a marker tells the saga in telegraphic style: "Camped at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in early Sept. -- Attacked by Indians directed by Mormons -- formed a corral with wagons -- Fought several days till ammunition exhausted -- approached by Mormons under flag of truce -- promised protection -- surrendered -- all were killed except for 17 small children -- found later in Mormon homes -- rescued by Army in 1859 -- taken to Arkansas. . ." This Arkansas marker tells much more history than Utah's. Another Arkansas marker at Caravan Springs is clearer still: "The entire party, with the exception of seventeen small children, was massacred at Mountain Meadows, Utah, by a body of Mormons disguised as Indians." But Arkansas is hardly forthcoming about its own massacres, such as the murder of surrendered black Union soldiers at Poison spring (see [chapter] 53). Meanwhile in Virginia, a marker for the Warrascoyak Indian village notes that "their village was destroyed in 1623" -- by whom is left obscure. All across the United States, when the dominant group has committed wicked deeds, historical markers either simply omit the acts or write of them in the passive voice. (5) Thus the landscape does what it can to help the dominant stay dominant and the rest of us stay ignorant about who actually did what in American history. (6)