Massacre at Mountain Meadows
Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Author: Ronald W. Walker

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-02-09

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 0199830975

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On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter. Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping narrative offers fascinating new insight into why Mormons settlers in isolated southern Utah deceived the emigrant party with a promise of safety and then killed the adults and all but seventeen of the youngest children. The book sheds light on factors contributing to the tragic event, including the war hysteria that overcame the Mormons after President James Buchanan dispatched federal troops to Utah Territory to put down a supposed rebellion, the suspicion and conflicts that polarized the perpetrators and victims, and the reminders of attacks on Mormons in earlier settlements in Missouri and Illinois. It also analyzes the influence of Brigham Young's rhetoric and military strategy during the infamous "Utah War" and the role of local Mormon militia leaders in enticing Paiute Indians to join in the attack. Throughout the book, the authors paint finely drawn portraits of the key players in the drama, their backgrounds, personalities, and roles in the unfolding story of misunderstanding, misinformation, indecision, and personal vendettas. The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. Neither a whitewash nor an exposé, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre
The Mountain Meadows Massacre

Author: Juanita Brooks

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2012-09-06

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0806185384

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In the Fall of 1857, some 120 California-bound emigrants were killed in lonely Mountain Meadows in southern Utah; only eighteen young children were spared. The men on the ground after the bloody deed took an oath that they would never mention the event again, either in public or in private. The leaders of the Mormon church also counseled silence. The first report, soon after the massacre, described it as an Indian onslaught at which a few white men were present, only one of whom, John D. Lee, was actually named. With admirable scholarship, Mrs. Brooks has traced the background of conflict, analyzed the emotional climate at the time, pointed up the social and military organization in Utah, and revealed the forces which culminated in the great tragedy at Mountain Meadows. The result is a near-classic treatment which neither smears nor clears the participants as individuals. It portrays an atmosphere of war hysteria, whipped up by recitals of past persecutions and the vision of an approaching "army" coming to drive the Mormons from their homes.

Blood of the Prophets
Blood of the Prophets

Author: Will Bagley

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2012-09-06

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 0806186844

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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 of over 120 men, women, and children, and drawing from a wealth of primary sources, Bagley explains how the murders occurred, reveals the involvement of territorial governor Brigham Young, and explores the subsequent suppression and distortion of events related to the massacre by the Mormon Church and others.

American Massacre
American Massacre

Author: Sally Denton

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0307424723

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In September 1857, a wagon train passing through Utah laden with gold was attacked. Approximately 140 people were slaughtered; only 17 children under the age of eight were spared. This incident in an open field called Mountain Meadows has ever since been the focus of passionate debate: Is it possible that official Mormon dignitaries were responsible for the massacre? In her riveting book, Sally Denton makes a fiercely convincing argument that they were. The author–herself of Mormon descent–first traces the extraordinary emergence of the Mormons and the little-known nineteenth-century intrigues and tensions between their leaders and the U.S. government, fueled by the Mormons’ zealotry and exclusionary practices. We see how by 1857 they were unique as a religious group in ruling an entire American territory, Utah, and commanding their own exclusive government and army. Denton makes clear that in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the church began placing the blame on a discredited Mormon, John D. Lee, and on various Native Americans. She cites contemporaneous records and newly discovered documents to support her argument that, in fact, the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, bore significant responsibility–that Young, impelled by the church’s financial crises, facing increasingly intense scrutiny and condemnation by the federal government, incited the crime by both word and deed. Finally, Denton explains how the rapidly expanding and enormously rich Mormon church of today still struggles to absolve itself of responsibility for what may well be an act of religious fanaticism unparalleled in the annals of American history. American Massacre is totally absorbing in its narrative as it brings to life a tragic moment in our history.

Mountain Meadows Massacre
Mountain Meadows Massacre

Author: Richard E. Turley (Jr.)

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780806155739

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Historians have long debated the circumstances surrounding the massacre, one of the most disturbing and controversial events in American history, and painful questions linger to this day. Based on the highest curatorial standards, this invaluable collection allows readers the opportunity to form their own conclusions about the forces that lay behind this dark moment in western U.S. history.

Mountain Meadows Massacre
Mountain Meadows Massacre

Author: Richard E. Turley (Jr.)

Publisher: Brigham Young University Studies

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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Presents two newly discovered collections of documents relating to the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Mountain Meadows Witness
Mountain Meadows Witness

Author: Anna Jean Backus

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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Philip Klingensmith (b. 1815) was born in Pennsylvania to Philip Klingensmith and Mary Anderson. His ancestors were German Lutherans who settled in Pennsylvania in the late 1600s. Philip eventually moved to ohio where he married Hannah Creemar (1826-1891). They became members of the LDS Church and settled in Nauvoo, later moving to Utah. In Utah the Klingensmith family eventually settled in Cedar City where he was called as the bishop. In 1857 the Mormons received news of the approaching army and what became known as the Utah War started. In the fall of that year, the Mountain Meadows Massacre ocurred, wherein a non-Mormon wagon train was attacked and destroyed by Indians and Mormon militiamen. Philip Klingensmith was involved and later went with other men, including John D. Lee who was eventually tried and executed for his part in the tragedy. Philip gained the enmity of members of the Church by leaving the Church and turning state's evidence against Lee. Philip was married to three wives and was the father of twenty-four children. He and a number of his family eventually settled in south-eastern Nevada and southern Utah.

September Dawn
September Dawn

Author: Carole Whang Schutter

Publisher: Carole Whang Schutter

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1434300226

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On September 11, 1857, the first act of religious terrorism in the United States took place in Utah when a group of fanatical Mormons massacred a prosperous wagon train of 120 settlers from Arkansas and Missouri on their way to California. Driven by a despotic Brigham Young who thundered chilling messages of Blood Atonement from the pulpit, the faithful committed polygamy, murder and castration in the name of God. Based on one of America's most horrific historical events, this is the story of the improbable romance between two nineteen-year-olds from starkly different worlds, the son of a Mormon Bishop, and the daughter of a Christian pastor. In a beautiful, pristine valley called Mountain Meadows, Jonathan, tormented by the execution of his beautiful mother by a lecherous Apostle, falls in love with beautiful, spirited Emily. Ordered to spy on the wagon train by his father, Jonathan tames a magnificent wild black stallion and wins the heart of the girl who has captured his. The tension builds to a crescendo with the growing conflict between Jonathan and his father Jacob. Fanatically wedded to the cause, Jacob believes in the righteousness of the atrocity commanded by the Prophet and the leaders of the Mormon Church. Another victim of the tragedy is Jonathan's beloved brother, good-natured Micah, who self-destructs in the process of becoming a mass murderer. In the midst of the massacre, Jonathan must choose between his brother and his faith, or Emily. As Jonathan races to save Emily before September Dawn, the reader is left breathless with heart-pounding anticipation as the scope and magnitude of their love amidst the searing fire and ashes of the Mountain Meadow Massacre dramatically, and unforgettably, unfolds.

House of Mourning
House of Mourning

Author: Shannon A. Novak

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13:

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"On September 11, 1857 some 120 men, women, and children from the Arkansas hills were murdered in the remote desert valley of Mountain Meadows, Utah. This notorious massacre was, in fact, a mass execution: the victims were bludgeoned to death or shot at point-blank range. The perpetrators were local Mormon militiamen whose motives have been fiercely debated for 150 years." "In House of Mourning, Shannon A. Novak goes beyond the question of motive to the question of loss." "By integrating archival records and oral histories with the first analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site, Novak offers a detailed and sensitive portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies." "The history of the massacre has often been treated as a morality tale whose chief purpose was to vilify (or to glorify) some collective body. Resisting this tendency to oversimplify the past, Novak explores Mountain Meadows as a busy and dangerous intersection of cultural and material forces in antebellum America, House of Mourning is a bold experiment in a new kind of history, the biocultural analysis of complex events."--BOOK JACKET.