From the article: To whet your appetite, topics will include: the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre; controversies surrounding various fundamentalist LDS groups...plural marriage in southern Utah...
(Southern Utah apparently had higher rates of polygamy than other parts of Utah)
Here is the speaker lineup: Mormon History Association: St. George Conference May 26-29, 2011
The lead-off sessions on Friday included the following sessions (p. 16 of above link):
1A. The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Public Perceptions of Mormonism
“Yearning for Notoriety: Questionable and False Claimants to America’s Worst Emigrant Massacre” Melvin L. Bashore, LDS Church History Department, Salt Lake City, UT
“What Lurked Behind Polygamy: Popular Constructions of Mormonism and the Mountain Meadows Massacre” Janiece Johnson, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
“John D. Lee’s Execution and the Near Death of Missionary Work” Brian D. Reeves, LDS Church History Department, Salt Lake City, UT
1B. The FLDS and the Outside World “Media Malfeasance? Misrepresentations of the FLDS” Craig L. Foster, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, UT
“The April 2008 YFZ Texas Raid: Its Impact on the FLDS Community and Other Fundamentalist Mormons” Newell G. Bringhurst, Visalia, CA
“The 1944 Polygamy Raids and the Supreme Court Decisions That Followed” Ken Driggs, Atlanta, GA
p. 21 of the above link says today's lineup includes:
Allred/Jensen Group Fundamentalism
“Prelude to Polygamy: The Early Life of Rulon C. Allred” Eric Paul Rogers, Hamilton, MT
“Beyond Stereotypes: Understanding Diversity within the Allred/Jensen Fundamentalist Group” Joseph Lyman Jessop, St. Anthony, ID
“Descendants of Early Mormon Polygamists among Contemporary Fundamentalists” Marianne T. Watson, Lehi, UT
First of all, hats off to these Mormon historians for addressing controversial historical subject matter when many simply wish these less-than "faith sustaining" historical realities would go away.
Still, when you have a session by an LDS Church History Department employee called:
“Yearning for Notoriety: Questionable and False Claimants to America’s Worst Emigrant Massacre” ya gotta wonder how much of that session was pure spin.
In light of these Mountain Meadows Massacre sessions held yesterday...and to add some balance from a non-Mormon angle of the event, I'll include some excerpts from Sally Denton's 2003 book entitled: American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857.
Almost 120 were killed on Sept. 11, 1857 -- the original 9/11 terrorist attack in our country. Committed by Mormons. Overall, about 125 died...seven men were shot dead in the original siege on these emigrants heading from Arkansas to Central CA Sept. 7. The siege ended Sept. 11 with the massacre as the Mormons, per John D. Lee, the only man held accountable for the massacre.
Lee said he was under orders from the Mormon apostle George A. Smith to 'use up' any emigrant wagon train coming through Southern Utah. St. George, Utah is named after this Mormon leader.
"During his final months in jail, Lee would write four conflicting and contradictory confessions. The accounts varied on the role of the individuals. What was consistent in them all was Lee's purpose at the meadow of following the orders of his [Mormon militia] military and spiritual leaders to avenge the blood of the prophets--the oath Lee considered sacred above all else since he had first become 'the Life Guard of the Prophet Joseph Smith' in Nauvoo." (Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 Vintage Books, division from Random House, p. 231)
“George A. Smith was sent south to personally deliver the [Brigham Young] orders to church leaders along the southern route to California...Gratified by the militia units mustered and drilling in the outlying colonies, the blustering, overweight, and overwrought apostle fueled the Saints' fanaticism and fear of annihilation.” (Denton, p. 115)
“Smith claimed. 'Suppose an emigrant train should come along through this southern country, making threats against our people and bragging of the part they took helping to kill our prophets,' Smith posed to [John D.] Lee. 'What do you think the brethren would do with them? Would they be permitted to go their way, or would the brethren pitch into them and give them a good drubbing?' … Lee told Smith in no uncertain terms that any emigrant train that passed through in the near future would be 'used up' – a euphemism all Mormons understood to mean slaughtered. 'I really believe that any train of emigrants that may come through here will be attacked, and probably all destroyed.' Lee told Smith...” (Denton, p. 116)
George Smith, less than three weeks before the massacre, arrived in Southern Utah in late August, 1857. Smith was both an “apostle” and militia leader in the Lds church. Rachel Lee, one of John D. Lee's wives, recorded messages at the time in her diary that Smith's messages were “full of hostility and virulence.” (Denton, p. 116)
Lee's first trial resulted in a hung jury: "...the eight Mormons and one Jack Mormon favoring acquittal, the three non-Mormons leaning toward conviction" (Denton, p. 226)
Mormon leaders stonewalled witnesses. Brigham Young and George Smith both were conveniently ill...and "Of more than one hundred called, fewer than half would surface, and many of those came under duress." (Denton, p. 225)
"Assistant prosecutor Robert N. Baskin summed up to a packed but silent courtroom. Calling the massacre 'a crime against civilization and humanity,' Baskin accused the Mormon Church of impeding every investigation into the incident and charged Young with being an accessory after the fact." (Denton, p. 226)
The declared mistrial resulted with media coverage that ”seemed to national journalists to be a blatant manipulation of justice only heightened the outrage of a public now widely informed about the atrocity. From New York to Sacramento, editorials cried foul. Charging that the jury was fixed, that the church had colluded to prevent key witnesses from testifying, and that dozens more either had perjured themselves or had had convenient lapses of memory..." (Denton, p. 226)
In Round Two of Lee's trial, Brigham decided they would make Lee the sacrificial lamb by brokering a deal with the prosecutor (Howard): "Young would make available all witnesses and evidence necessary for a conviction of Lee. In exchange [prosecutor] Howard would limit the testimony implicating Young, George Smith, and other church leaders in the affair, and drop charges against Dame." (Denton, p. 228)
Excerpts from Sally Denton's 2003 book entitled: American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 (Vintage Books, division from Random House):
The murders on Sept. 11, 1857 were over fairly quickly, as about 50 Mormon men carried them out:
“One one of the murderers later remembered that by his gold pocket watch the killings of some 140 men, women, and children had taken no more than three minutes.” (Denton, p. 136)
Some of the victims included “apostate Mormons” who had taken up the opportunity of a wagon train to leave Utah with them: “The Mormon apostate refugees, who were still wearing their endowment garments, were 'blood atoned' by the ritual slitting of throats.” (Denton, p. 137)
The executioners grouped 15-17 child survivors and took them to the Hamblin ranch:
”...two of the children cruelly mangled and the most of them with their parents' blood still wet upon their clothes, and all of them shrieking with terror and grief and anguish...” (Denton, p. 139)
“Georgia Ann Dunlap was eighteen months old. Her parents and seven sisters and brothers had just been executed in front of her eyes, and she was now alone with her five-year-old sister, Prudence Angelina, who could not stop sobbing. Emberson Tackitt, four, had watched his mother hacked to death, while his father, two older brothers, an aunt, and three cousins were being shot and their throats cut a few yards away. Gushing blood from the gunshot wound that had mangled her ear, Sarah Frances Baker, three, her five-year-old sister, Mary Elizabeth, and the youngest of the surviving infants, nine-month-old William, had just watched the slaughter of their parents and a seven-year-old sister. Felix Marion Jones was eighteen months old. Within a few minutes his family had been wiped out, and he would not be able to remembered anything about his murdered mother, father and sister. Christopher “Kit Carson” Fancher, five, along with his twenty-two-month—old sister, Triphenia, had seen their wounded father shot in his litter and their mother murdered with an ax, while six brothers and sisters under the age of nineteen were being killed nearby. Nancy Sophrona Huff, at four, was the sole survivor of a family of six annihilated in the same ways. One child died as they arrived at Hamblin's ranch. Another, one-year-old Sarah Dunlap, had had her left arm nearly severed by a musket ball. Clinging frantically to her, their dresses soaked in blood, were her sisters Rebecca, six and Louisa, four. They had all seen the slaughter of their seven brothers and sisters, as well as both parents, and Rebecca had pried her baby sister from the arms of their dead mother.” (Denton, p. 140)
“One-year-old Sarah Dunlap was shot in the elbow, sending all of the children into a frenzy 'One of the Mormons ran up to the wagon, raised his gun and said 'Lord my God, Receive their spirits. It is for Thy Kingdom that I do this,' reported Sallie Baker. She then watched as McMurdy fired at two men who were comforting each other, killing them both with one bullet. She saw the wag driver bludgeon a fourteen-year-old boy to death with the butt of a gun.” (Denton, p. 137)
As it turned out for Sarah Dunlap, she became blinded by an infection (Denton, p. 239).
The children remained as kidnapped victims of the Mormons for two years, finally being re-united with Arkansas relatives on Sept. 15, 1859.
One of the kidnapped victims, Sallie Baker, said of that day: “I remember I called all the women I saw 'mother.' I guess I was still hoping to find my own mother, and every time I called a woman 'mother,' she would break out crying.” (Denton, p. 207)
It took a Federal Judge, John C. Cradlebaugh, to kick into gear the necessity of attempting accountability for the Meadow Mountain Massacre: “A deeply religious man, he found that his ideas of Christianity were far different from those of this sect, that his own deeply held view of angels bore no similarity to those of the Avenging Angels of Mormondom...as he would later report to Congress, that 'the Mormon church is guilty, of the crimes of murder and robbery as taught in their books of faith.'” (Sally Denton, p. 191)
One of the ways we know that the Mormon church was implicated – either as part of the plot or criminal cover-up – is how the wagon train's plunder was dealt with:
“The plunder proceed with a strange quiet. Women from Cedar City and nearby settlements arrived to remove the calico dresses and lace pinafores of the women and children, pulling off their expensive shoes, and ripping earrings, brooches, and rings off the corpses, most to be turned over to the church. 'Their fine stock, their pleasure vehicles, their musical instruments, and abundant and elegant outfit, excited the cupidity of the sacerdotal robbers,' the Salt Lake Daily Tribune later reported...” (Denton, P. 149)
“'There was no clothing left on man, woman or child, except that a torn stocking leg clung to the angle of one.” Haight, Higbee, and Dame would argue asa well over the distribution of goods. The bloody clothing and bedding that had been gathered by the women and others were taken to the cellar of the church tithing office in Cedar City...As for the reported $100,000 worth of gold said to be on the train, most of what was retrieved—the actual amount would never be revealed—was turned over to the church treasury in Salt Lake City. The forty wagons were given to local Mormons for use in hauling lead ore from Nevada. The carriages emblazoned with stags' heads were transported to Salt Lake City, where at least one of them was used by Brigham Young. Approximately nine hundred head of cattle were corralled near Cedar City, branded with the church's 'cross,' and driven north to the capital.” (Denton, p. 150)
Klingensmith was a Lutheran to Mormon convert who became a witness in the Lee trial: "He told how he traveled to Salt Lake City in October 1857 and in the presence of Lee and another witness discussed with Young the details of the murders and the distribution of the plunder. Klingensmith testified that Young ordered him to turn over all the loot from the massacre to Lee. The cattle had been branded with a cross--the church designation...” (Denton, p. 224)
Per Denton, the Cedar City Mormons post-massacre “flaunted their windfall”: “...others passing through the territory remarked on the new prosperity among the settlers. A drover named Hugo Hickman had observed the 'poverty and rags' worn by the residents of Cedar City in early 1857. But now he 'was greatly surprised to see the people so well dressed, in States Jeans [jeans made in the United States instead of homespun in Zion], Silks and Satins...rich in clothing, cattle, wagons, julery [sick] and money.' Hickman wrote in his diary that a local friend told him 'all the property and clothing' he saw 'knocking around came from the Mountain Meddows.' [sic].” (Denton, p. 173)
If you want to read more about this topic a good book is, "Mormonism, Mama and Me" by Thelma Geer. She is a descendant of John D. Lee. The book is a free download on a Kindle. Very enlightening. I just recently finished reading it.