The Ark

In 1857 a wagon train laden with gold, passing through Utah was attacked
and the people in it slaughtered. Were Mormon church officials responsible
for the massacre or not? Sally Denton investigates.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Mountain Meadows in the State of Utah conjures a beautiful pastoral image. But it was the site of the worst civilian slaughter in American history.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Ark.

The date was September 11, 1857, and the murder of 140 unsuspecting people by John Lee and company, was unprecedented. Lee was a Mormon, close to the leader of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, and according to historian Sally Denton, his obedient servant.

American Massacre is Sally Denton's account of this extraordinary story, for which the Mormon Church today still denies responsibility.

Sally Denton: As far as white on white, civilian on civilian slaughter, there's nothing to match it in the annals of American history. It's also particularly horrific of course because of the way that it happened. This was not a battle, this was out and out slaughter after the victims had been guaranteed safe passage. It was under a flag of truce, at the universal white flag symbol of peace and truce, and having been completely disarmed. So this was not some battle, it was a cold-blooded slaughter.

Rachael Kohn: Well the year is 1857, and coincidentally September 11, when a wagon train of families were set upon and massacred. Who were they?

Sally Denton: The wagon train itself was the wealthiest wagon train to ever traverse the United States. They originated in Arkansas, there were 140 people; the exact number of those killed remains kind of murky, because some of them split off at an earlier point. But initially in the spring of 1857, 200 people left Arkansas. It was a group of interconnected families who were moving to California to settle near a town called Visalia.

Rachael Kohn: And they were Methodists, I gather.

Sally Denton: Most of them were Methodists. There were also I think some Presbyterians. They had a Methodist minister with them who held services every Sunday. They came from Arkansas to Salt Lake City and fully intended to continue over the Sierra Mountains into northern California, but once they got to Utah they were convinced by Mormon leaders there in Salt Lake City to turn south and take their extraordinary herd of cattle, they had 1,000 longhorn cattle.

As I said, it was the wealthiest wagon train. They had over $1-million worth of gold, they had carriages that were emblazoned on the doors for the women to ride in, they had Kentucky thoroughbreds, and very fancy and expensive Hambletonian stallions. The bloodstock was extraordinary and the goods on the train were 'an eye-catching over-abundance' as one witness called it. But they were convinced to turn south because they were told that this massive herd of cattle that they had would find more grass down south, and that's when some of the people split apart from the main wagon train and continued on their journey across the Sierras, even though the Mormons had told them there had been early snows. But that turned out not to be true, it had not snowed yet, and that was part of the effort to lure them south.

Rachael Kohn: Well from all accounts, especially the confession of the ringleader, the Mormon John Lee, the perpetrators were Mormons who'd consciously set out to massacre this family train. What did they have against the immigrants, or were they just after the booty?

Sally Denton: There's absolutely no dispute that it was a Mormon militia who perpetrated the act. When it first happened, the church initially the Mormon church and the hierarchy in Salt Lake City tried to blame the Paiute Indians which was a kind of notoriously pacifist tribe in Southern Utah, and when that wasn't really going to wash, first they defamed the train itself, and blamed them, and said that they had been poisoning their springs, and it was retaliation by the Indians for that.

When Utah started negotiating with the United States government for Statehood, 20-some years later, it became clear that the government was not going to proceed with Statehood until somebody was held accountable for this horrible crime. And there was a lot of public pressure on the government to hold somebody accountable.

At that point, the church in an orchestrated fashion, turned its attention to John D. Lee, as a lone scapegoat and started this new cover story really, of putting it on renegades in Southern Utah, which still of course served to shelter the hierarchy in Salt Lake City from any culpability.

Rachael Kohn: Isn't there some evidence that the Mormons actually painted themselves up as Indians?

Sally Denton: They painted themselves as Indians and in fact after killing 140 people, ruthlessly, and shooting them, bludgeoning them and slitting their throats, especially slitting the throats of many of the Mormon apostates, who had joined the train along the way, who were trying to escape from Utah, the defecting Mormons that they called apostates, even after that they then went to the corpses and shot arrows into the backs, so that anybody who came across the carnage would believe that Indians had perpetrated the massacre.

Rachael Kohn: So there's a lot of incriminating evidence, certainly which you cite in the book, including confessions and the fact that the Mormons confiscated all the goods, the cattle, and even the children under eight. Now why is it that children under eight were allowed to live?

Sally Denton: Well in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon faith, eight is the age of innocence. So they decided to save all children under the age of eight, although there were many children under the age of eight who were killed in the slaughter, but there was an attempt to save everybody under the age of eight.

They then distributed them to the houses of the very men who they had just witnessed kill their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Ultimately it would be those 17 children under the age of eight who would bear the first testimony against the Mormons.

They would be collected two years later by the United States Army and taken to Washington to testify, returned to their relatives, what relatives were left back in Arkansas. Ultimately it was these children who told the tale of the Indians who slaughtered their families, and then when they went to the streams and washed off their faces, they were white men. And then as I said, they had to live with these families, which was, you can imagine how horrendous that would have been.

Rachael Kohn: Extraordinary. Well the Mormons certainly had a pretty bad reputation at that time. A lot of Americans were concerned that they openly practiced polygamy. But they also had a penchant for a degree of violence, which is quite explicit in your book, the militias and the secret group, the Danites, which John Lee was the head of, or certainly a principal player.

Sally Denton: Well they had had an enforcement arm within the church, dating back to the early days when Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of the faith, was leading his flock westward as they met with persecution in various places, and there's no doubt that they met with persecution. I don't think it was always unjustified, because of the practice of polygamy and other practices such as blood atonement, where you slit the throat of your enemy and were thereby saving that person, by letting his blood spill back into the earth.

And this violent kind of undertone, this enforcement body, the Danites, they were named for the sons of Dan, from the Book of Daniel in the Bible, and also called the Destroying Angels, or the Avenging Angels they were operating under.

Of course the whole question is, were they operating knowingly under the direct orders of Brigham Young, the President and Prophet of the church at the time, or were they renegades? It's a murky area to determine exactly; these are not the kinds of things where people write down direct orders, in fact they go to great lengths to see that there is nothing committed to paper.

Rachael Kohn: Well recently that area of land in Mountain Meadows was dug up to look for evidence of the massacre. Given the power of the Mormons in the State of Utah, was that a difficult thing to organise?

Sally Denton: Well actually they were not looking for bones, it was the opposite. The church which acquired the property, actually owned much of it at the time of the massacre, but acquired everything else over the years, the church ten years ago, responding to the descendents of the victims, the relatives of those who had been killed, started pressing the church for some kind of monument at the location, and the church finally agreed to build something there.

During the course of building it, they sent in a back-hoe to begin this foundation for a concrete wall, and at that point, the back-hoe accidentally unearthed skeletal remains. So that's what set off this firestorm of controversy.

The State began a forensic investigation. There were archaeologists and forensic anthropologists and all of the scientists who went there, they were able to determine pretty quickly that every victim that had been accidentally dug up had been shot point blank between the eyes. So that became suddenly 150 years later, it became impossible for the church to continue blaming the Paiute Indians, but as quickly as they began the forensic investigation, the Governor of Utah, Mike Leavitt, ordered that all the bones be re-buried and Mike Leavitt, his grandfather Dudley Levitt, was a participant in the massacre. So then suddenly all of the bones were re-buried and the investigation was stopped.

Rachael Kohn: Sally, a new plaque was erected there, and it does acknowledge Mormon involvement in the massacre, but it still falls short. You cite a chilling quote from Gordon B. Hinckley at the 1999 dedication of the monument. He said, 'That which we have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgement on the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of that fateful day.' So was it just some local bad guys who did it?

Sally Denton: Well I think that's clearly what the church would like everyone to believe. And I thought that that was a very, very interesting and well chosen set of phraseology for Hinckley. He was President of the church at the time, still is, but I think that there was some suggestion that maybe the lawyers for the church insinuated that language at the last minute, fearing that maybe descendents of some of the victims might try and seek reparation from the church if they did acknowledge any official involvement. But I think it's more complicated than that as well.

I think that, in fact I wrote an op. ed. piece for The New York Times a couple of months ago about why exactly this church is so adamantly in refusal about acknowledging and taking responsibility and atoning for this horrible crime. And I do think the role of Brigham Young in the religion is so much larger than even the Pope I think in the Catholic faith or certainly a priest or a deacon or a minister for another Protestant religion, as prophet, seer and revelator. That's a pretty deified, elevated, role in a faith, and to acknowledge responsibility or culpability of something of this magnitude by a leader of that magnitude, I think is very problematic for believing devout, and believing Mormons everywhere in the world.

Rachael Kohn: Sally finally, this book must be sending reverberations through the Mormon community; how has it been received in America?

Sally Denton: The book is doing very well, I'm happy to say, commercially. I was very well received in Utah. I went there actually a bit reluctantly, but I did a reading and speaking event in Salt Lake City, and in Logan, Utah, and I was very impressed with the extraordinarily large and respectful crowd that I got there. And I'm reminded that there are a lot of good, believing, devout god-fearing Mormon men and women who are horrified by this event, and intellectually want to know what happened, and want to atone in their own private and personal ways.

Rachael Kohn: Sally are you yourself in any way descended from Mormons?

Sally Denton: I am. I was not raised a Mormon, but my great-great-grandmother converted to Mormonism in 1849 in London, and brought the first piano into the West and so I have a long-standing kind of respect I would say, for that stock of people. But I was not raised Mormon myself.

THEME

Further Information

Church response to Sally Denton's American Massacre
http://www.lds.org/newsroom/mistakes/0,15331,3885-1-16767,00.html

Publications

Title: American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857
Author : Sally Denton
Publisher: Knopf, 2003