September 11, 1857: The Mountain Meadows Massacre by Mormon Saints

This September, the movie September Dawn will soon be released. While the day the World Trade Centers went down will be fixed in the memory of most people and it may not be entirely coincidental that a movie about religiously inspired violence chose an event that occurred on the same day on the calendar as the attacks on the Twin Towers. September 11th is also important to note that the movie details a historical event that occurred on September 11. The event in question is the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

While the Mormons in the movie may stand in for the way we see Islamic terrorists today, in the eyes of the Mormon settlers who had been pushed to Utah, regardless of how innocent or not the Saints may have been in the crimes that pushed them towards the territory, it was justified in the eyes of the leadership and of the Saints who committed it. From a modern standpoint, it may have been an act of paranoia committed upon innocent men, women, and children, but had you been a Mormon family uprooted several times for what the leadership cast as religious persecution, you might have been ready to take aim and fire at a wagon train that you feared might be coming to uproot you. Add to that the fact that the incident took place in what Historians would later dub the "Utah War."

While the details of the event and who was behind it may remain forever unresolved, we can guess with a reasonable degree of certainty what happened during the event. A group of settlers, natives, Mormon settlers disguised as natives or a mix of people descended upon a wagon train that came from Arkansas consisting of 137 settlers. Casualties on both sides were initially heavy, but eventually the people in the wagon train surrendered and put up a flag of truce. Only 17 people, all children survived the attack. Years later, all but one would be returned to their families at the insistence of the United States Army.

After the even took place, speculation ran high about who committed the atrocity. Will Bagley, Mormon historian, theorized that the orders came down from Brigham Young and notes tat in 1860 Young ordered the original cairn under which the bodies were placed at site destroyed. In 1998, Gordon B. Hinckley, current prophet ordered a monument rebuilt and the site explored to find the original site of the cairn. (A memorial had been built after the 1860 destruction, but farmers and vandals were felt to have moved it.)

Whether or not Young knew and orchestrated the attack will likely be debated for a long time. September Dawn will probably name him as the architect of the conspiracy, although such speculation about a movie that has not yet been released will be premature. Officially, John D. Lee got the blame and was executed. Whether or not John D. Lee was scapegoated and people higher up the chain should have been punished is not clear, but it was clear that he was involved in the event.

If you go see the movie which comes out on August 24^th, you may want to do some research on the actual event as the movie seems more to be a commentary on religious extremism rather than a historical picture. Even if that is the case, the Mountain Meadows Massacre will likely fascinate Mormon conspiracy theorists for a long time to come.

Sources:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/lds_mass.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre