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Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.

Last updated on: June 25, 2026 at 7:00 pm by Dan Peterson

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Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. 2026-06-25T19:00:11-06:00 Dan Peterson

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One of the several relatively new monuments at Mountain Meadows (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The principal theme of our filming this week, although not the only one, was the infamous mass murder that occurred in southern Utah on 11 September 1857. A fairly vigorous discussion has ensued in the wake of my Tuesday evening blog entry, “On the Massacre at Mountain Meadows,” and I call your attention to the comments there. One critic has posted a number of times to contradict my expressed judgment that theology, as such, had little or nothing to do — certainly not in any direct sense — with the Massacre. Rather, I said, “The Massacre was motivated by primal fear.”

I would like to reply here to his counterclaims. The disingenuous assertions by certain other critics, that I’m trying to “bowdlerize” Brigham, to whitewash the crime at Mountain Meadows, and to defend its perpetrators, merit no response. I’ll permit what I’ve actually said — and, perhaps even better, what I’ve said on camera (which will eventually be made fully public) — to define my position on this tragic subject.

I think that I’ll call the critic in question by the Ancient Greek term Antidikos, which referred, often in a legal setting, to an “adversary” or “opponent” or “accuser.” (I’m trying not to make this personal, and he’s pseudonymous in any case.) Here is the critic’s first comment:

Antidikos: It wasn’t fear that caused this unspeakable massacre of men, women, children, and the elderly . . . but a deeply ingrained us-versus-them religious exceptionalism that convinced ordinary LDS settlers that such slaughter was a holy act of survival.

I honestly don’t know what would make an “act of survival” somehow particularly “holy.” It seems to me that Antidikos is simply and without evidence asserting his presupposition that the motive for the Massacre was religious. But that is precisely what I deny. I don’t see the evidence for his claim.

And yet, in his subsequent comments, he repeatedly describes the Massacre as having been propelled by “ideological fanaticism,” driven by “a toxic ideology.” It was, he says, “motivated by religious extremism and xenophobia.” At multiple places, he describes those who committed the crime as “the LDS pioneers,” which, at first blush, seems inarguably true and sadly uncontroversial. There is no denying the fact, unfortunately, that the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But his repetitive references to “the LDS pioneers” seem to me to represent a not especially subtle effort to insinuate the “toxic ideology” that, he imagines, made the Massacre virtually inevitable: It was, he implies, the theology of the Church.

Antidikos: [T]hese murderers believed that destroying another group was not a crime, but a sacred duty required for their own safety or revenge.

If it’s not clear enough, I’m arguing against the idea that the murderers acted out of simple, panicky “primal fear.” Instead, the evidence points to a much more calculated, religiously/holy driven mindset.

I flatly deny this. Or, perhaps to put it more mildly, I remain to be convinced of it.

Another view of a monument erected (by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I’m told) at the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in southern Utah (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

The Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred under very specific circumstances, which were, in a sense, a kind of “perfect storm” that would lead basically good people (their fundamental decency is demonstrated by their lives both before and after that fatal September 1857) to commit an unspeakable offense against a basically good group of strangers:

Responding to misleading reports of a “Mormon rebellion,” President James Buchanan had decided to replace Brigham Young as the governor of Utah Territory with Alfred Cumming, of Georgia. But he hadn’t informed Governor Young or the people of Utah that he was doing so.
President Buchanan decided to send a detachment of roughly 2,000 federal troops — approximately a third of the entire United States Army at the time — as an escort for Alfred Cumming, but he had informed neither Governor Young nor the people of Utah of this fact and, of course, the intentions of the armed federal troops had not been explained.
At the same time, President Buchanan abruptly canceled mail contracts for Utah, effectively leaving the Territory under an information blackout.

Governor Young was only told of the pending arrival of Alfred Cumming and a massive escort of federal troops on 24 July 1857, during a Pioneer Day celebration. (Orrin Porter Rockwell and Salt Lake Mayor Abraham Smoot, returning from the East, brought the news to him.) Surely it’s not surprising that residents of Utah were left in a state of anxiety, even panic. These were a people, after all, who had been subjected to persecution since the founding of the Church in April 1830, who had been driven violently from Missouri and then violently expelled from Illinois, and who had left the United States behind to seek refuge in the Great Basin West.

A Wikimedia Commons public domain view over the Mountain Meadows area

Antidikos tries to claim that it was “a deeply ingrained us-versus-them religious exceptionalism” on the part of “the LDS pioneers” that led to the burst of fatal violence in southern Utah during September 1857. I don’t see the evidence for that. I see little if anything to suggest that the Latter-day Saints of Cedar City and its environs attacked the Baker-Fancher emigrant train solely or largely because it was made up of non-Latter-day Saints. I see no evidence for the insinuation that a sense of “exceptionalism” led “the LDS pioneers” to see themselves as superior to moral law.

Rather, it seems obvious to me that it was an understandable fear that set the stage. Antidikos claims that “the LDS pioneers” viewed their action as “a holy act of survival.” I agree that they saw it, quite incorrectly but also, alas, rather understandably, as an act of survival. (We’ll explain this at some length in the appropriate video episodes of Becoming Brigham when they appear.) And, as I’ve said, when survival seems to be at stake, that begets fear. (Even non-religious people, I suspect, are likely to regard the possible deaths of their families with apprehension.) The supposed “holiness” of their effort to survive is, from my point of view, merely a question-begging addition from Antidikos. I ask for his evidence. The behavior of the perpetrators in the decades after 1857 — denial, obfuscation, deception, flight, even the intentional misleading of the apostolic investigators who were sent to southern Utah by Brigham Young — certainly doesn’t suggest any confident, bold, or unashamed belief in the Massacre’s “holiness.” (When James Haslam delivered Brigham’s letter to Isaac Haight telling him to leave the emigrant train alone, Haight is said to have burst into tears. “Too late,” he wept. “Too late.”)

Was it a matter of “us versus them”? Of course it was. That’s a trivially obvious fact, common to every struggle between differing groups. (Think of the Hatfields and the McCoys.) But the dynamics of the episode as it played out wouldn’t have been substantially different had the groups in question been Armenians and Turks, say, or Palestinians and Israelis, or Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, or Navajos and Utes, or Hutus and Tutsis, or Serbs and Croats and Bosnians.

We did some of our Tuesday filming at this hilltop overlook. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The immediate spark that led to the Massacre was probably connected with the orders from Governor Young for the residents of Utah Territory to store up grain and preserve their cattle rather than to sell them to emigrant trains passing through the region. Such nutritional sources might be sorely needed during a potentially protracted guerrilla war that would interfere with sowing and harvesting and that might well lead to the abandonment of farms and the disruption of trade networks. The Baker/Fancher train was trying to amass provisions for its push across the desert to California; the colonists of southern Utah were unwilling to sell such provisions, and tensions flared.

No “religiously/holy driven mindset” is required to account for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Yes, the religious difference of “Mormon” and non-“Mormon” played a role in President Buchanan’s decision to deploy troops to Utah. It was part of the distinction between the people of the Cedar City area and the members of the Baker/Fancher party. But so was the distinction between Utahn and Arkansan, between passing emigrant and resident, between the targets of the approaching federal invasion force and people who weren’t targets and who would be gone before the troops arrived.

Did the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre “believe that destroying another group was not a crime, but a sacred duty required for their own safety or revenge”? Yes, they probably believed that killing others in self-defense was no crime. They probably believed that it was their duty to protect their wives and their children and their neighbors. Historically and still today, most people probably have believed and do believe that self-defense is permissible, and that the defense of innocent others is a moral duty. One needn’t be a theist or a Christian or a Latter-day Saint to believe such things.

There is no evidence of which I’m aware that the Mountain Meadows Massacre was principally, let alone solely, motivated by theological doctrines or the sheer hatred of “infidels.” If Antidikos has evidence showing otherwise, he should share it. Simply repeating his conviction that the Massacre was an example of theologically-driven violence isn’t sufficient to make his case.

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