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Cover-Up

The Mormon efforts to cover-up the details and white-wash the massacre continues even today. In March of 2000 the Salt Lake Tribune told of the accidental unearthing of “the skeletal remains of at least 29 slain emigrants” at Mountain Meadows in Southern Utah. (Salt Lake Tribune, March 13, 2000, p. A1)

Scientists wanted to do a full study of the remains. However, Gov. Mike Leavitt, a descendent of one of the participants of the massacre, “encouraged state officials to quickly rebury the remains, EVEN THOUGH THE BASIC SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS REQUIRED BY STATE LAW WAS UNFINISHED.... the governor’s intercession was one of many dramas played out last summer, all serving to underscore Mountain Meadows’ place as the Bermuda Triangle of Utah’s historical and theological landscape. The end result may be another sad chapter in the massacre’s legacy of bitterness, denial and suspicion. (Salt Lake Tribune, March 12, 2000, p. A-1)

A rushed examination of the bones prior to reburial in 2000 showed:

At least five adults had gunshot exit wounds in the posterior area of the cranium — a clear indication some were shot while facing their killers....Women also were shot in the head at close range....At least one youngster, believed to be about 10 to 12 years old, was killed by a gunshot to the top of the head. ... Virtually all of the “post-cranial” (from the head down) bones displayed extensive carnivore damage, confirming written accounts that bodies were left on the killing field to be gnawed by wolves and coyotes. (Salt Lake Tribune, March 13, 2000, p. A-5)

The Salt Lake Tribune quoted the following from Gene Sessions, president of the Mountain Meadows Association:

It raises the old question of whether Brigham Young ordered the massacre and whether Mormons do terrible things because they think their leaders want them to do terrible things. (Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 14, 2000, p. A-4)

The paper went on to report:

Noted Mormon writer Levi Peterson has tried to explain the difficulty that Mormons and their church face in confronting the atrocity of Mountain Meadows.

“If good Mormons committed the massacre, if prayerful leaders ordered it, if apostles and a prophet knew about it and later sacrificed John D. Lee, then the sainthood of even the modern church seems tainted,” he has written. “Where is the moral superiority of Mormonism, where is the assurance that God has made Mormons his new chosen people?” ...

But acknowledging any complicity in Mountain Meadows’ macabre past is fundamentally problematic for the modern church.

“The massacre has left the Mormon Church on the horns of a dilemma,” says Utah historian Will Bagley, author of a forthcoming book on Mountain Meadows. “It can’t acknowledge its historic involvement in a mass murder, and if it can’t accept its accountability, it can’t repent.” (Salt Lake Tribune, March 14, 2000, p. A-4)

http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no98.htm#After%20the%20Massacre