Blood of the prophets : Brigham Young and the massacre at Mountain Meadows

The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857, was the single most violent attack on a wagon train in the thirty-year history of the Oregon and California trails. Yet it has been all but forgotten. Will Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets is an award-winning, riveting account of the attack on the Baker-Fancher wagon train by Mormons in the local militia and a few Paiute Indians. Based on extensive investigation of the events surrounding the murder of over 120 men, women, and children, and drawing from a wealth of primary sources, Bagley explains how the murders occurred, reveals the involvement of territorial governor Brigham Young, and explores the subsequent suppression and distortion of events related to the massacre by the Mormon Church and others.

Tells the story of the Mountain Meadows massacre, one of the West's most controversial historical subjects and the single most violent incident in the history of America's overland trails. Traces the crime from its origins in the bitter struggles of the Latter-day Saints in Missouri and Illinois to its legacy of lies and betrayal, which still haunts Utah today.

Publishers Weekly

In 1950, Utah historian Juanita Brooks stunned the Mormon community when she published The Mountain Meadows Massacre, a detailed and careful history of LDS involvement in the 1857 slaughter of an emigrant party from Arkansas headed for California. She argued that Mormons had instigated the attack and then covered up the bloodshed with a vow of secrecy. However, based on the available evidence in the 1940s, her research did not indicate that Brigham Young, the president of the Church, had ordered the attack. Enter this account by Salt Lake Tribune columnist Bagley, who draws respectfully from Brooks's work and also unpublished diaries, letters and other documents to raise the ultimate question: "What did Brigham Young know, and when did he know it?" In this meticulously researched and well-argued book, Bagley provides ample evidence to demonstrate that Young was at least an accessory after the fact, who led the effort at a coverup and eventually scapegoated John D. Lee, a massacre participant who was executed in 1877. Bagley's book presents some new and fascinating source material: accounts by the Paiutes who participated in the attack, memories of the young children who survived it and, most interestingly, the voices of those Mormon objectors who refused to cooperate in the massacre or who dared to break the silence about it afterward. Bagley also does a fine job of situating the massacre within the context of the Mormon Reformation, a short but intense period of fundamentalist zealotry. Although it's not flawless, this study will, like Brooks's, stand the test of time as a reflective and well-researched history of Mormonism's darkest hour. (Sept.) Forecast: There has been a burst of recent interest in the atrocity, including Sally Denton's American Massacre (coming from Knopf) and Judith Freeman's novel Red Water (Pantheon, Jan. 2002). In May, three historians employed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced their own plans to do a full-scale interpretive history of the subject, tentatively titled Tragedy at Mountain Meadows (Oxford, 2003). After that book's publication next year, all relevant documents owned by the Church will be made available to the public for the first time, so there may be still more interpretations in the offing. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

In 1857, over 100 men, women, and children in a wagon train from Arkansas were murdered in southern Utah by local settlers aided by Southern Paiute warriors. For 50 years, Mormon historian Juanita Brooks's The Mountain Meadows Massacre has been the standard work on the subject. Here, independent historian and Salt Lake Tribune columnist Bagley claims only to extend Brooks's work. But by using documents not available to Brooks and by following her example in pursuing the truth wherever it led him while not going beyond the available evidence, he confirms her private opinion that territorial Mormon leader and governor Brigham Young was heavily involved in both the massacre and its cover-up "The massacre at Mountain Meadows on September 11,1857, was the single most violent act to occur on the overland trails, yet it has been all but forgotten. Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets is the most extensive investigation of the events surrounding the mass killings since Juanita Brooks published her study, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, in 1950."--BOOK JACKET.