Before the awful events of September 11, 2001, the worst religiously inspired mass murder in American history took place in 1857, when 128 innocent Americans were ruthlessly slaughtered. That tragedy, like the more recent one, was also perpetrated by religious extremists;  and eerily, that massacre also occurred on a September 11.  The religious extremists in 1857, however, were not Muslims but Mormons, and the massacre on that long-ago September 11 took place not on the east coast of America, but on the far reaches of the western frontier. 

Known to historians as the “Mountain Meadows massacre,” this well-organized and religiously motivated ambush of a wagon train of settlers headed for the California territory remains a dark shadow on American history. It also provides an example of the extent to which the Mormon church continues to hide the truth regarding its founders. That carefully crafted cover-up is about to be severely tested, however, by a movie scheduled for release on June 22.  “September Dawn” will be R-rated for violence, which will not surprise anyone familiar with accounts of the historical event it portrays.

While I have not yet seen the movie, I have read several scholarly accounts of the mass murder.  Anyone whose interest is piqued by the movie, and who wishes to learn more, would do well to consult American Massacre (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) by Sally Denton. The author, herself a descendant of Mormon pioneers, has meticulously detailed the complicated background of this almost forgotten American genocide.

Denton spends several chapters explaining how the militaristic practices and political ambitions of Joseph Smith in Ohio, and later the autocratic rule of Brigham Young in Utah, created the circumstances that led to the atrocities at Mountain Meadows. Her chapter describing the actual massacre vividly pictures the bravery and the suffering of the settlers during the five-day siege; the treachery of the Mormons in deceiving the innocent victims, with elaborate promises of safe passage, into surrendering their weapons; and a painfully detailed account of the vicious manner in which the defenseless prisoners, including women and young children, were then slaughtered.

In another disturbing passage Denton describes how the murderers looted the corpses, with much of the plunder ending up in the Temple treasury in Salt Lake City, and how the Mormons then even divided up the surviving children as well. And, in an act of outrageous shamelessness, some of the participants in the massacre and subsequent cover-up later submitted false claims to the United States government for reimbursement for their “expenses”!

One particularly grisly but revealing footnote occurred on August 3, 1999. Descendants of the massacre’s victims have long pressured the Mormon church, which controls the Mountain Meadows land, to allow a monument on the site, which had fallen into disrepair, to be renovated. The church finally agreed and a backhoe was quietly dispatched to the meadow to begin preparation. To the dismay of church officials, the backhoe almost immediately unearthed more than thirty pounds of human skeletal remains bearing signs of a violent execution. The dreadful discovery was promptly reported to church authorities in Salt Lake City.

Although an initial forensic study of the remains had begun, as required by law, Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, himself a direct descendant of one of the massacre perpetrators, quickly ordered the remains re-interred despite the strenuous objections of federal authorities. In response, Mike Huckabee, then the governor of Arkansas, acted on behalf of the victim’s descendants living in his state to request federal stewardship of the site, which would remove it from church control. Scott Fancher, a descendant of one of the wagon train’s leaders, said at the time, “It’s like having Lee Harvey Oswald in charge of JFK’s tomb.”

–Dan Williams
College Avenue church of Christ
El Dorado, Arkansas