The Mountain Meadows Massacre

In September of eighteen fifty-seven, a wagon train of emigrants from Arkansas paused at a meadow in the mountains of southwestern Utah, in the territory that is now Washington County, about thirty miles north of present-day St. George. The Baker-Fancher Party was large, roughly one hundred twenty men, women, and children, well-supplied, and headed for California. They had crossed the Missouri River in the spring and traveled the southern route, the same road taken by John C. Fremont a decade before.

What happened at Mountain Meadows on the eleventh of September, eighteen fifty-seven, is one of the darkest events in Utah's history. Over five days of siege and negotiation, militiamen from the Iron County militia, acting with the involvement of local Latter-day Saint leaders, killed approximately one hundred twenty members of the party. Only seventeen children, judged too young to be witnesses, were spared.

The context matters for understanding, though it cannot justify the killing. The United States government had dispatched an army to Utah that summer to replace Brigham Young as territorial governor, and the Territory was in a state of near-war panic, with inflammatory rhetoric from Church leaders about resisting federal authority. Some historians believe that leaders in Salt Lake City had direct knowledge of the plan; others argue the orders came from local commanders. Brigham Young denied responsibility. The historical record remains contested. John D. Lee, a militia commander at the scene, was the only man tried and executed for the massacre, in eighteen seventy-seven, twenty years after the event.

The site is now a National Historic Landmark. A monument there lists the names of those who died. Historians Will Bagley and Ronald Walker have written extensively on the massacre's causes and consequences; their accounts reach different conclusions about culpability at the highest levels, and that dispute continues in the scholarly literature.