Word o’ God

                Many people including myself have been anxiously awaiting the release of the movie “September Dawn”.  There is a mysterious air surrounding this movie; you see it was filmed over a year ago, possibly two.  Twice the release has been postponed; the official website has undergone extensive changes, mostly reduction of content.  Some are pointing fingers at the church, due to the content of the movie.  While the story is historical fiction, it touches on one of the most grotesque subjects in Mormon history.  While the majority of the church fellowship knows nothing about it, the ones that do are often gravely misinformed.  The film portrays a romance between a Mormon girl and a gentile boy that happens to be a part of the Fancher wagon train.  The people of the wagon train were the victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.   

                If this extremely graphical drama were to be released and viewed by current LDS members, that are either unaware of the events, or at least some of the true events, it could be very devastating.  Just as I was shocked the first time I read of Martin Harris’s confession to the leaders of the church in Kirtland that “no one had ever actually seen the golden plates”, so too would the modern saints of the church be shocked.  How could you soften the blow, so to speak, of such a shocking dramatization?   One way would be to preempt it by doing something you have not done in the 150 years since the incident occurred, publicly address it to your followers.  This way you can take some of the proverbial sting out of the punch. 

It is ironic that this month (August 2007) in the Ensign there is a rather long article about the Mountain Meadows Massacre; also a new book on the subject has been commissioned by the church and soon to be released (Just in case you need additional information).  If I were conspiracy minded I would conclude that the church was successful in convincing the producers of the movie to hold off the release until they had completed their preemptive strike (as it were).

For one hundred fifty years church historians and LDS writers have misled the curious, by providing false information, limited information or just totally avoiding the subject. 
As an example…
      I had always avoided the Mountain Meadows Massacre when talking with my father about issues I had found with the church, partly because it was so depressing and partly because I hated the thought of putting him in a position where he would feel he had to defend such an atrocity.  One evening he actually brought it up.  He wanted to know if it was perhaps one of my problems with the church.  Now my father was sixty-six years old at this point, and has spent all of them in the church.  My father has been a branch president more than once, served a mission, had stake callings, is a high priest, you name it he has probably done it, when it comes to the church.  I was not totally surprised when he said something like “well you know it was the Indians, they were upset because the wagon train had polluted the water upstream with dead animals.  The Mormons were sort of caught in the middle. Trying to appease the Indians.”  He had been curious at some point and even acquired a book (apparently from a LDS source)  I am sure in his sixty-six years of church meetings he had never heard a detailed discussion or even mention of the event. 

While I do welcome the few admissions of facts in the Ensign article, at first I was not sure why they would provide them to the general membership.  I assume that the normal yarns would not be passable in today’s information age; there are too many people that have the proof to dispute a modern blatant deceit.  However as anyone that has really studied this Massacre, may deduce, they still leave out important details, and draw very broad conclusions.  I will grant that it would take more than every page of the magazine to provide the scope of the information available. 

I do not want, nor could I in a few pages discuss all the important details, however I do feel it my duty to point out a few things… 
                The article avoids any of the preface to the attack or the conditioning the Mormon citizens had been enduring from the leadership of the church.  Proof of the mentality of the people is evident when you consider other similar actions of the people, like the Circleville Massacre.  Also you have the discussions John D. Lee has testified to having with his direct leaders, and church officials.
                While some historians dispute the tale of the two horsemen being confronted and one being shot while the other reentered the camp with news that it was really white men and not Indians that were attacking them, requiring the Militia to kill them all to prevent them from telling (The ensign article does not give you enough details here anyway).   This concept really does not make sense because, to begin with how could two horsemen escape an encircled wagon train ( which by the way, is more than the wagons parked end to end in a circle) ,  surrounded by militia men in Indian garb, and real Indians (well on the first day anyway) without even being noticed?  And then the single surviving horseman is able to reenter the entrenchment?  Even if this scenario had taken place, would the victims blindly surrender to the very people that they had just discovered were imitating Indians, under the pretence that John had arranged a truce with said fake Indians?   Huh?
                I really like the one-liner that says a witness “Johnson” stated that settlers did most of the killing.  It is more likely that they did all of the killing.  There is evidence that the Indians left after the first day when some of their men were mortally wounded, and they also feared repercussions of the federal Government if the Mormons used them as scapegoats, which they tried to do anyway  (they had been victims of the Government before, not fun!).  At this point it was really not worth a few cattle, and it was very uncharacteristic of them to endure a prolonged siege.
                The addition of some of the details in this article implies that, as most people assume anyway, the church has a lot more details than they are admitting.  While this is most likely in self defense, and reasonably so, it is still wrong.
                One point that impressed me in the whole horrid affair was the US Army’s response, which seems to be unimportant in this article.  When the Army finally arrived and began to investigate the Massacre, the first thing they did was collect the bodies, that had been left naked strewn in the valley unprotected from the elements and the wild animals, and erected a makeshift grave and memorial, with a cross inscribed with the words “Vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the Lord”.  Secondly the Captain that discovered that there were children that had been spared and distributed amongst LDS families, he demanded the return of the children at gun point.
                In my opinion there are two events that prove undeniably that the 1857 leadership of the church condoned the killing of those people.  Brigham Young and his entourage some time later while visiting some of the outlying territories passed by the afore mentioned monument that the Army had erected, after reading the inscription he raised his arm to the square and said “Vengeance is mine, and I have taken a little” after this, some of his men disassembled the monument and “not a stone was left in place”.  Far worse Isaac Haight and John D. Lee were justly excommunicated from the church, the only two men to be punished.  However Isaac Haight was later reinstated to the church.  John D. Lee was executed on the site of the massacre.  Believe it or not John D. Lee was posthumously reinstated to the church with full restoration of office and status.       Do you really need to know anything else?                As a summary we have gone from “the Indians did it” to well “John D. Lee did it” to now “it was the local leadership acting on their own with out any preconceptions placed by the leaders of the church”, perhaps in another one-hundred-fifty years we will get the whole truth.