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American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 by Sally Denton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the 3rd book I've read about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the first one by a non-Mormon. In September 1857, not quite a year after the handcart disaster kicked into high gear, a wagon train of non-Mormons was massacred at Mountain Meadows, men, women, and all children over 8. Children under 8 were allowed to survive, and adopted into Mormon households, both under the assumption that they were too young to remember and under a Mormon theory about the innocence of small children. The Mormon books I've read basically sum up the wagon train as "nobody knows who they were because when they died there was nobody left to identify them"; Denton goes hunting. She can't find information about everyone, but she certainly provides biographical information that makes a mockery of the official story at the time, that these immigrants had been rude and offensive, had said they were the people who murdered Joseph Smith, that they poisoned the bodies of dead cattle, thus killing Indians (and maybe, as the story ballooned, killing Mormons, too). Denton goes one farther than the Mormon historians, who agree that the poisoning story was nonsense, and says the whole thing was nonsense, that the men leading this train had come through Utah before and knew what they were doing. The hostility in their encounters with the Mormons came from the Mormon side.

Denton also follows what happened to the surviving children as best she can, interviewing living relatives and finding family stories. She is less interested in the Mormons playing pin-the-blame-on-the-donkey, although she agrees that John Doyle Lee was betrayed and scapegoated by his surrogate father Brigham Young; although he was one of the men responsible for the massacre, he was not the only man responsible, and Brigham Young, the master of plausible deniability and the innocent air of "Who, me?", knew what was going on and did not lift a finger to stop it. Rather like Henry II, he may never have said outright that he wanted the wagon train massacred, but the people around him were adept at interpreting "will no one rid me of this turbulent priest" to "I want him dead."

(I am not a fan of Brigham Young.)

Denton is fascinating as a parallax view of what was going on in Utah in 1857, a much more skeptical eye than even Juanita Brooks. The massacre at Mountain Meadows is never going to make sense, but I think she makes as much sense out of it as can be made.

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