If you were to ask the average American today to identify the religion of the extremists who committed the mass murders on September 11, he or she would answer “They were Muslims.” If you had asked that same question of our grandparents a couple of generations ago, however, they would have immediately replied, “They were Mormons.”
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. And 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 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 and a contemporary example of the extent to which the Mormon church continues to hide its true beginnings. Sally Denton, herself a descendant of Mormon pioneers, has meticulously detailed the complicated background of this almost forgotten tragedy in American Massacre (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
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 a climate that led to the atrocities at Mountain Meadows. The 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 Arkansans, 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”!
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One particularly grisly but revealing footnote occurred on August 3, 1999. Descendants of the massacre’s victims had 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 unmistakable signs of brutal executions.
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 over the strenuous objections of federal authorities.
In response Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, of behalf of the victim’s descendants living in this state, requested 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