Affixing blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Affixing blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 BY DAN PETERSON

This is not a photo of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We have none. So I went for a cheerier note. This is a photo (by James Jordan) of director Mark Goodman working just a few days ago with extras in Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, for the “Witnesses” film project.

I note that I’m being accused by a small handful of people of blaming the Mountain Meadows Massacre on “anti-Mormons.”

1) When I write anything for the public, at least some people will misread it in the most negative way that they possibly can.

2) The Mountain Meadows Massacre is, for quite manifest reasons, a controversial topic. And, accordingly, it’s one that some people are strongly inclined to exploit for ideological ends.

Of course, I don’t blame the Massacre on “anti-Mormons.” I blame it on the people who did it.

But the perpetrators interest me very particularly because, overwhelmingly, they do not seem to have been conventionally bad people – thugs, murderers, and the like – either before September 1857 or, for the most part, thereafter.

So the question that puzzles me (in this case as in more than a few others) is, What makes ordinary, decent people commit so extraordinarily horrific a crime?

Reading the Oxford book Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ron Walker and Rick Turley and Glen Leonard, when it first came out many years ago, I felt as if I were seeing a Greek tragedy unfold. There was a certain inexorable logic to what ultimately happened – a horrible logic, obviously, but one in which it made a certain degree of sense, after one bad step had been taken, to take the next one. I found myself wanting to scream “No! Stop!” while knowing what the outcome was inevitably going to be.

To me, if we see the people who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre as utterly unlike ourselves, we’re not only falsifying history (and not merely in the sense that they, like me and many of my readers, claimed membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) but refusing to see a lesson (or, more aptly, lessons) in what happened. If they were something of a different species, their cautionary tale can have little if anything to teach us.

In order to understand what they did, we need to understand what factors acted upon them. And, beyond any reasonable dispute, one of the most important of those factors was a prior history of persecution and forced migration.

That doesn’t mean that the Missouri mobs bear legal and moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre any more than an abusive father is responsible for the violent acts committed much later by a criminal son. But neither are the two unrelated. Human evils ramify. They do damage, among other things to human psyches.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre certainly isn’t the Restoration’s finest hour. It’s anything but faith-promoting. But it shouldn’t be exploited as a weapon against the Church or against religious belief, either. It’s too complex to be reducible to a self-serving slogan on a partisan bumper sticker.

teppe, you've reached a new low in your posting when you wrote, "Without ‘Buchanon’s Blunder’ there would have been no ‘Mountain Meadows Massacre’.

Nothing justifies the murder that occurred by morons.

Here is historical description of what occurred when mormons massacred men, women and children emigrants, merely traveling to California, then stripped and looted them...

"The plan was devious, but effective. Major John Higbee, in command of the forces at Mountain Meadows, persuaded John Lee and William Bateman to act as decoys to draw the emigrants out from the protection of their wagons. Lee and Bateman, carrying a white flag, marched across the field to the emigrants' camp. The desperate emigrants agreed to the terms promised by Lee: They would give up their arms, wagons, and cattle, in return for promise that they would not be harmed as they embarked on a 35-mile hike back to Cedar City. Samuel McMurdy, a member of the Nauvoo Legion, took the reigns of one of the wagons into which were loaded some of the youngest children. A woman and a few seriously injured emigrant men were loaded into a second wagon. John Lee positioned himself between the two wagons as they pulled out. Following the two wagons, the women and the older children of the Fancher party walked behind. After the wagons had moved on, Higbee ordered the emigrant men to begin walking in single file. An armed Mormon "guard" escorted each emigrant man.
"When the escorted men had fallen a quarter mile or so behind the women and children, who had just crested a small hill, Higbee yelled, "Halt! Do your duty!" Each of the Mormon men shot and killed the emigrant at his side. Meanwhile, on the other side of the hill, Nelphi Johnson shouted the order to begin the slaughter of the women and older children. Men rushed at the defenseless emigrants from both sides, and the killing went on amidst "hideous, demon-like yells."
Nancy Huff, four years old at the time of the massacre, later remembered the horror: "I saw my mother shot in the forehead and fall dead. The women and children screamed and clung together. Some of the young women begged the assassins after they run out on us not to kill them, but they had no mercy on them, clubbing their guns and beating out their brains." It was over in just a few minutes. 120 members of the Fancher party were dead. The youngest children, seventeen or eighteen in all, were gathered up, to later be placed in Mormon homes. None of the survivors were over seven years old.
The next day, Colonel Dame and Lt. Colonel Haight visited the site of the massacre with John Lee and Philip Klingensmith . Lee, in his confession, described the field on that day: "The bodies of men, women and children had been stripped entirely naked, making the scene one of the most loathsome and ghastly that can be imagined." Dame appeared shocked by what he found. "I did not think there were so many of them [women and children], or I would not have had anything to do with, Dame reportedly said. Haight, angered by Dame's remark, expressed concern that Dame might try to blame him for an action that Dame had ordered. The men agreed on one thing, however: Mormon participation in the massacre had to be kept secret. Within twenty-fours hours, Haight had another reason for concern. Brigham Young's reply to his inquiry arrived in Cedar City. "Too late, too late," Haight said as he read Young's letter and began to cry.
https://www.famous-trials.com/mountainmeadows/936-home

Disgusting.

Mormons had been rebelling against the Territorial Governor and federal authority over the Utah Territory.

Eventually President Buchanan sent the Army to restore federal authority. The army arrived, there was no fighting, there was a sort of military occupation, it all gets overshadowed by the Civil War and forgotten. The only casualties were the non-Mormon civilians massacred at Mountain Meadows.

The ‘Mormon War’ presaged what was coming in the secession crisis and the Civil War, except that it dealt with a Territory and not States. Buchanan had to deal with both, since some States seceded while he was still President.

And while he was willing to send the Army to enforce Federal authority over the Utah Territory, he wouldn’t do so against the seceding States. In his opinion the federal government didn’t have the right to use force against States even though in his opinion secession wasn’t legal.

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