Echo Church opens up to the Mountain Meadows Massacre

The Mountain Meadows Massacre, where a company of 100 people, after passing through Echo Canyon on their way to California from Arkansas, were killed in Southern Utah by a militia comprised of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been the subject of books and documentaries throughout the years.

Unfortunately, some of the information in these various forms of media is inaccurate due to hearsay and folklore, so historians Barbara Jones Brown and Richard E. Turley Jr. wanted to rectify those errors in their new book, “Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath,” which was published in May.

The authors will do a signing and talk about their book, new findings and surprises during a free presentation at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 14, at the historic Echo Church, 60 Temple Lane, in Echo.

The Echo Church, which is usually closed for the season after Labor Day, will open just for the talk, said Sandra Morrison, treasurer of the church’s board of trustees.

“Rick and Barbara have been in great demand all over Utah to speak, since the book was published, so we were very lucky that they are coming to Echo in October,” she said. “With Echo and Echo Canyon being the gateway to the territory at that time, where everyone passed through to live their future lives, seems the perfect place to have the lecture.”

“Vengeance Is Mine” is a follow-up to “Massacre at Mountain Meadows,” edited by Jones Brown, and published in 2008 by Turley, Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard. The book details the massacre that was carried out by 50 to 60 Mormon men, who covered it up by blaming the local Paiute tribe.

“We are aware that with our new book coming out 15 years after the first one, that there would be some who had read the first book,” Turley said. “So for them, we wanted this book to be a sequel. But, at the same time, we feathered in the required information so those who had not read the first book could read it without reading the first book.”

The new book picks up on Sept. 11, 1857, after the last attack on the company, said Jones Brown.

“We start up in Salt Lake City and go back and forth between the two places in the opening chapter,” she said. “Then we go forward from there using flashbacks and summary to bring readers up to speed.”

Turley had the idea of splitting the story up into two parts in 2006, before he began writing the 2008 book.

“The reason is because we knew the both ends of the story, the front and back, were equally important,” he said. “One part of the story is the crime itself, and the second is the punishment, which is an impactful story to tell after the massacre.”

During the process of threading back through the story and the originating facts of the massacre, the authors learned things they didn’t know while working on the first book.

Some of those events were the two trials of John D. Lee, who led the attack, the political wrangling that pushed back the other trials of those who had been involved and additional events that took place around the same time of the attack, Jones Brown said.

“There wasn’t just one company that was targeted,” she said. “There were so many more, and we looked at various companies that were attacked between Sept. 7 and Oct. 3, 1857, throughout the state of Utah.”

The attacks emerged out of tensions and conditions surrounding the Utah War, which was the result of the federal government sending troops to Utah to stop polygamy and censure Mormon authority in Utah, said Jones Brown, director of Signature Books Publishing.

“We looked at the motivations of all of these attacks and were able to pin down and identify more clearly than ever before that Brigham Young had a policy in place to try to convince the federal government to pull back the troops who were occupying the Utah Territory,” she said. “His strategy was to convince Congress that if troops came into Utah Territory that all hell would break loose, if you will, and he would never hold the Indians back from raiding cattle of passing immigrant companies.”

Young, however, did not encourage death and killing, according to Jones Brown.

“In fact, he’s continually saying, ‘We don’t want a drop of blood spilt,'” she said. “But things went awry at Mountain Meadows.”

While the first book figures out why things went awry, the second book helps readers understand it better by “blowing apart” the old narrative about how the massacre was investigated and prosecuted, said Turley, assistant church historian and recorder and former managing director of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s Church Historical Department.  

“There’s been sort of a myth, an apologetic view, that has passed down from person to person, scholar to scholar throughout the years without deep investigation,” he said. “With the Mountain Meadows story, people have quoted previous authors without examining underlying assumptions, and we had the advantage to go back and look at primary sources and test them against previous people who have written about this topic.”

In doing so, Jones Brown and Turley discovered many of these assumptions were baseless.

“We found that myths and oral traditions were picked up and passed along and held up as key components of the massacre story simply aren’t true,” he said.

These findings bubbled to the surface through the work that a team of researchers, as well as Turley and Jones Brown, did at 31 of the 50 United States, three national archive facilities and the Mormon Church History Library.

“There were many experts who allowed us to take all this data and analyze it and put it together as authors,” Jones Brown said.

Both Turley’s and Jones Brown’s fascination with the Mountain Meadows Massacre came through different paths.

“I don’t know of any time that I didn’t know about the massacre, but when I became managing editor of the Church History Department in 1986, it wasn’t long after that we started working with descendants of perpetrators and victims on a monument that was erected on Dan Sill Hill in 1990,” he said. “So immediately I was working on this topic. I also wrote a piece for the Encyclopedia of Mormonism in 1992, so I’m already writing about this topic.”

As Turley worked on these projects, he felt that people, especially church members, needed to get over their fear of history, especially the history surrounding the Mountain Meadow Massacre.

“There is this sort of sense that history is a dangerous thing, but history is what it is,” he said. “So I thought let’s grab the worst topic in Latter-day Saint history, shine a huge spotlight on the darkest corner and let the chips fall where they may.”

Jones Brown learned about the massacre when she was 22.

“I was appalled and confused by it, so I wanted to learn more about it,” she said. “So, after I edited the first book, and Rick called me to write this book, I felt like I was supposed to do it.”

The biggest questions that ran through Jones Brown’s mind were how could otherwise good people participate in such a heinous crime, and what were the circumstances that had to happen for it to occur?

“I finally understand that question, and Rick and I are sharing that with the world, helping other people understand how something like this can possibly happen,” she said. “There is no excuse or justification for what happened at the massacre, but knowing the historical context helps us understand that these things can happen. And, hopefully, by learning about them, we will no longer repeat the mistakes of the past and make a better future.”