On the Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Last updated on: June 25, 2026 at 2:29 pm by Dan Peterson

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On the Massacre at Mountain Meadows 2026-06-25T14:29:00-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A stained-glass window with an Elijah theme (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

These study notes for students and teachers of the Sunday School curriculum of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, generously provided by Jonn Claybaugh for the next appropriate lesson, went up earlier today on the notoriously unchanging website of the Interpreter Foundation: Come, Follow Me — Old Testament Study and Teaching Helps — June 29-July 5, 2026: 1 Kings 12-13; 17-22 — “If the Lord Be God, Follow Him”

A portion of the principal memorial at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

We spent the day filming for our Becoming Brigham series at Mountain Meadows, where, in September 1857, Latter-day Saint militiamen from Cedar City and other southern Utah settlements treacherously murdered the men, the women, and the older children of an emigrant wagon train from Arkansas that was bound for California along the Old Spanish Trail. They had paused at Mountain Meadows in preparation for the next (and in many ways most difficult) portion of their journey, across the vast desert that stretched between them and their destination. They were fattening up their cattle, repairing their wagons, waiting for the temperatures to cool, and trying, with little success, to secure provisions from the pioneer farmers of Utah’s southern towns.

And, of course, their difficulty in obtaining supplies was a major contributor to the tensions that would ultimately culminate in the appalling slaughter at Mountain Meadows. But why were the Latter-day Saints of southern Utah so churlish in dealing with the Baker-Fancher emigrant train? Was it because, as members of the Restored Church, they despised “Gentiles”? No, it was because roughly a third of the entire Army of the United States was marching toward them, sent by the newly-elected Democratic president, James Buchanan — who, by the way, has long been esteemed one of the worst presidents ever to occupy the office — and they were being urged by Governor Brigham Young and other ecclesiastical and territorial leaders to store up grain and other necessities in preparation for what they feared might prove a very protracted guerrilla war of resistance against the federal invasion. The Latter-day Saint settlers of Utah might be forced to abandon their farms, and to forego sowing and harvesting for an indefinite period while they retreated to the mountains to fight. They had, really, nowhere else to go: They had fled beyond the boundaries of the United States, and yet, now, a significant portion of the armed forces of the United States was coming toward them, with evident hostile intent, in their Great Basin retreat.

Cyrus Dallin’s 1897 statue of Brigham Young, near Temple Square in Salt Lake City
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

In fact, the territorial capital of Salt Lake City would be temporarily abandoned when, facing what Utah and Church leaders understandably regarded as an invading federal army, Brigham Young ordered the “Move South” in the spring of 1858. Approximately 30,000 residents completely evacuated Salt Lake City and the surrounding northern settlements, packing up their belongings and moving beyond the southern border of Utah County. They left behind only a small group of men whose assignment was to guard Salt Lake City and the other abandoned settlements and, if necessary, to burn them to the ground. When the U.S. Army, commanded by Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, marched through the Salt Lake Valley in June 1858, it found a completely deserted ghost town. (It’s worth pointing out that Colonel Johnston, who had been assigned to put down a supposed Mormon rebellion in Utah, would be killed less than four years later, on 6 April 1862, at the Battle of Shiloh during the American Civil War. Ironically, by the time of his death, he was fighting as General Albert Sidney Johnson of the Confederate States Army. Which was, by the way, made up of actual rebels.)

We discussed these and other political and economic issues, which formed the background for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, creating a framework into which portions of my interview with Richard Turley will eventually be placed. We make, and will make, no effort to justify the Massacre. It was a tragedy and a flagrant, murderous, injustice, and it is the worst black mark in its history against the Latter-day Saints and, unfortunately, their Church. That any of the Saints, who had long been driven and robbed and pillaged and oppressed and murdered, could have done such evil is almost beyond fathoming.

In his dialogue Gorgias, the great ancient Greek philosopher Plato argues (through his “Socrates”) that doing wrong is fundamentally worse than suffering wrong because committing an injustice corrupts and degrades the soul, which is the most precious part of a person. Suffering physical or material harm impacts the body or external circumstances, but committing a wrongful act inflicts a spiritual and moral disease on the soul itself.

One repeated theme of our conversations was that it is virtually certain that, contrary to accusations leveled against him ever since the Massacre took place, Brigham Young did not order the killings at Mountain Meadows. There has never been any serious evidence of his guilt in this regard, and there is a large quantity of evidence against it. Did his rhetoric in the months leading up the attack on the Baker-Fancher train contribute to an atmosphere of war hysteria? Very likely. And he wasn’t alone in such rhetoric among Utah and Latter-day Saint leaders. But James Buchanan’s actions also contributed: Without informing Governor Brigham Young, Buchanan appointed Alfred Cumming to replace him and sent Cumming to Utah accompanied by a very substantial military force, also unannounced and unexplained. And he abruptly cut off mail contracts to Utah, leaving the Territory in an information vacuum. Is it any wonder that “paranoia” gripped Utah’s residents? Rumors of the Army’s approach only reached Brigham Young on 24 July 1857. He was given the news by Salt Lake City’s mayor, Abraham Smoot, and Porter Rockwell, who had hurried back from the East with it and who interrupted Pioneer Day celebrations in Big Cottonwood Canyon to tell Brigham.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre as imaginatively envisioned by somebody who wasn’t there. In such treatments, John D. Lee and his “Mormonites” are behaving as . . . well, as “Mormonites” DO. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Another theme, though, at least in my own comments, is that what happened at Mountain Meadows was not an evil result of religion. Not, at least, in the way that critics have often sought to portray it. Yes, religion was obviously involved in the sense that the Latter-day Saints were where they were in the Great Basin because of their religious beliefs, and in the sense that the perpetrators of the Massacre were overwhelmingly Latter-day Saints while their victims were not. But the Massacre wasn’t motivated by theology. Nobody was practicing “blood atonement” or seeking to kill “gentiles” simply because they were “gentiles.” This wasn’t a “crusade” or a jihad.

The Massacre was motivated by primal fear. The Saints had nowhere to go. They had left New York and Ohio, been driven from Missouri and Illinois. They had taken refuge in the distant and arid Great Basin West, initially beyond the borders of the United States, and they had simply run out of options. They felt that they and their families were now facing an existential threat. They were also deep in the fog of war. They had no clear picture of what was happening but, whatever it was, it was deeply menacing. And when people are trapped or feel existentially threatened, they do desperate things. This isn’t unique to Latter-day Saints, or to Christians, or to theists. Under similar circumstances, mutatis mutandis, whether involving religious differences or ethnic differences or whatever other differences humans can find about which to fight, similar actions can easily be imagined and similar things have happened.

Posted from St. George, Utah

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