The Mountain Meadows Massacre: Context and Aftermath
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The Mountain Meadows Massacre of September eighteen fifty-seven was not a spontaneous act. It emerged from a specific moment of extreme tension between the Latter-day Saint community and the United States government. The Utah War, the approaching federal army, years of persecution, and the theological conviction that the last days were near had produced in some quarters of southern Utah a psychology of siege that made extraordinary violence conceivable.
A wagon train of roughly one hundred twenty men, women, and children from Arkansas was traveling through southwestern Utah toward California. They were not soldiers. Some had made incautious remarks about Mormons in the tense weeks of that summer. Members of the Iron County Militia, the local LDS territorial force, along with Paiute allies they recruited, attacked the wagon train at Mountain Meadows, a valley that had been a rest stop on the Spanish Trail for generations. After a siege of several days, the militiamen approached under a white flag and offered safe conduct. The emigrants surrendered their weapons. The killing began. Only children six years old and younger survived, seventeen of them, who were distributed among local families.
The chain of command above the militiamen, including the role of Brigham Young as territorial governor, remains contested in the historical record. Young was sent a letter by militia leaders describing the situation before the attack, but whether he authorized, was informed in time to halt, or was insulated from the decision is not resolved in the primary documents. Historians have not reached consensus.
John D. Lee, a militia leader, was the only person tried for the crime. He was convicted and executed by firing squad at Mountain Meadows in eighteen seventy-seven, twenty years after the event. The LDS Church issued a formal statement of regret at the site in two thousand seven, one hundred fifty years later. The monument at Mountain Meadows names the victims. The grass still grows there.
