Review: Massacre at Mountain Meadows
On September 11, 1857 a band of Mormons in Southern Utah lured a large group of California-bound emigrants from their defensive coral under a white flagged pretense of protection. With local Piutes under their direction, they then slaughtered all but the youngest children. The story of this bitter event has fascinated generations.
Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 448 pages. ISBN: 0195160347.
Brad: This, in some ways, is just the latest in a long line of books (many of them quite recent) written on the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. Historians, journalists, and others have told this story and furnished analysis from a wide variety of angles and perspectives, suggesting a multiplicity of explanations and implications of this devastating tragedy. There is a sense, however, in which this is not just one new take on what we’ve already seen so much of. This is a collaboratively authored work that took the better part of a decade to write. The three authors also relied heavily on collaboration with independent readers, researchers, and editors, so there is a sense in which the finished product is the work of literally hundreds of people. What’s more, all three main authors are practicing LDS who describe themselves as faithful Church members. One of them, Richard Turley, is even the Assistant Church Historian and has worked in various capacities for the Church History department for more than a decade.
According to the many statements and conference presentations the authors have made over the past few years as well as the preface to this volume, the Church has supported this project by providing what they call “full and open disclosure.” Because “[t]horoughness and candor” were governing priorities, the Church granted the authors unfettered access to all relevant documents in its history library and archives, including (wait for it) the archives of the First Presidency. These facts are important and make this book unique for two overarching reasons. First, the authors had unprecedented access to relevant historical materials, as well as the resources to conduct unusually thorough research, a process that extended well beyond the walls of the Church history library. Second, and perhaps more significant (or, at least, more attention grabbing), this work has enormous implications for what the future of Mormon scholarship will entail. Just how free and open is the Church prepared to be when it comes to granting access to sensitive materials to professional, scholarly historians? How candid will a Church-condoned history of Mormonism’s most disturbing, embarassing historical moments actually be? These authors set a task to answer the question: “How could basically good people commit such a terrible atrocity?” How sufficient is their answer? Do they offer more than transparent apologia for the perpetrators of this unthinkably vicious crime or sweeping, knee-jerk indictments of any and all involved and of Mormonism (and, perhaps, religion) itself?
What follows is our take on the issues outlined above, from methodology and source material, to analysis and historical reconstruction, to the larger questions of meaning, culpability, uncritical obedience, and honesty. But before we delve in, I’d just like to say something about the actual writing. This is a surprisingly short and very readable book, especially considering the scope of the project. The authors (no doubt with the help of good readers and ambitious, heavy editing) have put together a gripping narrative, complex yet comprehensible, and brevity has served them well. Last time there was this much anticipation for a Mormon History book, Richard Bushman delievered us just shy of 600 pages. Massacre at Mountain Meadows chimes in at a refreshing 231, plus 4 appendices and endnotes. Very nice.
J. Stapley: Upon receiving the volume, I flipped to the end to find the bibliography. While the proofs that we reviewed did not include one (something that is hopefully rectified in the formal printing), it did have an interesting table of abbreviations for the most common references that is helpful for a review of commonly cited materials. As the introduction indicates, the researchers found or gained access to some very crucial and previously untapped sources: “Among the most significant discoveries in the church’s collections were the field notes of assistant church historian Andrew Jenson, who collected several reminiscent accounts of the massacre in 1892. This discovery, in turn, led to the full collection of Jenson materials in the First Presidency’s archive.” I felt like a prospector who just struck gold. I can’t imagine how the guy in the vault felt. Further, Ron Walker and Richard Turley are preparing the Jenson papers for publication - a hugely important movement for Mormon historiography. A couple of other important sources that I found novel to this volume were Extracts from Jacob Hamblin’s journal, in Jacob Hamblin to Brigham Young, November 13, 1871 in the Young Office Files as well as Jacob Hamblin statement, November 28, 1871, Young Office Files. Hamblin’s journal is available at the Utah State Archives, but it has two sections of pages ripped out. Presumably this communication includes at least some of those missing entries. [UPDATE June 13, 2008 - Brian Reeves at the LDS Church Archives has informed me that Donald R. Moorman with Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992), 137-8 (see also p. 304, notes 65-68) used the Hamblin letter and that, as per the preface of the volume, Moorman likely accessed the material in the 1960's. The documents were transfered to the Young Office Files in the late seventies or early eighties and were made publicly available in 2000.]
Brad: Yes. I think the Jenson materials are enormously important. The authors clearly rely extensively on them to assemble their narrative. There is another significant source (in addition to the ones you mention) that warrants attention. They revisited all of the minutes from John D. Lee’s trials, and had an expert in the 19th-century shorthands used generate new transcripts. These records also figure prominently in the notes attached to the sections describing the days leading up to the attack on the Fancher party and the massacre itself. Significantly, it seems that all these “new” sources will be made public for other historians and scholars to scrutinize — a major coup for Mormon History nerds like ourselves.
The authors’ reliance on these sources also points up the complicated methodological and analytical problems associated with historical reconstruction of this nature. Observe the following paragraph, a narrative account found on pages 159-60:
Stewart and White backtracked toward Cedar City and eventually found their quarry. The two immigrants were on horseback returning to camp and had paused to let their mounts drink from Little Pinto Creek near Leach’s Spring. Stewart and White approached the unsuspecting men and struck up a conversation. The Mormons learned that one of the immigrants was William Aden, the other the much-talked-of “Dutchman.” Seeing a tin cup attached to Aden’s saddle, Stewart asked to borrow it to get himself a drink. When Aden turned to reach for it, Stewart “shot him through the head, killing him instantly.” The Dutchman “put spurs to his horse and fled,” dodging the bullets fired after him, one of which apparently wounded him. The men at Hamblin’s ranch saw him speed past. So did the besieging Indians, who tried unsuccessfully to bring him down.
The economy of prose here is impressive. Yet the question remains: How did they put together that story? There is one note at the end of the paragraph. The corresponding endnote mentions the following sources: An entry entitled “Ellot Willden” in the Jenson papers from the FP vault (meaning, presumably, a portion of Jenson’s interview with Willden that Jenson did not include in the report he made based on his interviewing); “Lee’s Confession” from an 1877 issue of the Sacramento Daily Record-Union; “Lee’s Last Confession” from an issue of the San Fransisco Daily Bulliten Supplement, also 1877; a repeat mention of the Willden entry in the FP-vault portion of the Jenson papers; an “Ellot Willden” entry in the Jenson’s actual report (not kept in the FP vault); the “Phillip Klingensmith” testimony from the newly recontsructed transcript of Lee’s first trial; and an 1872 interview with John D. Lee by SL Tribune reporter J. H. Beadle.
J. Stapley: More clear are the times when they quote their sources directly. For example, the execution of the Cedar City plan (pg. 140, see also pg. 151-152):
Working through Higbee, Haight first asked Ellott Willden, Josiah Reeves, and possibly Benjamin Arthur to go to the Mountain Meadows, where the emigrants were expected to camp eventually. (64) The three young men were told that the “plan was to…have the Indians ne[a]r to attack on [the] Santa Clara, instead of the civil authorities arresting the offenders in Cedar.” (65) Part of the men’s assignment was “to find occasion or something that would justify the Indians being let loose upon the emigrants.” (66) They were also to get the company “to move on”-and effort to hurry the emigrants into the trap. (67)
64. Ellott Willden, AJ 2; Marry S. Campbell, AJ1; Mary S. Campbell, AJ2; D.W. Tullis, AJ1; Ellott Willden, AJ1; McGlasan; Whitney, 1:699.
65. Ellott Willden, AJ1
66. Ibid.
67. Mary S. Campbell, AJ2; Mary S. Campbell, AJ1.
This excerpt highlights the level of detail that the new sources allow, but also in the absence of bibliographic details, makes me question what the differences in the two Jenson collections actually are. According to an email communication from Richard Turley, “Jenson sometimes expanded from memory on his sometimes cryptic notes in the the subsequent transcripts. He also rearranged information to make it more understandable or omitted details that may have seemed unimportant. Thus to give a complete picture, it is sometimes necessary to cite both the notes and the transcripts.”
Despite the lack of bibliographic clarity, I do not think we could overstate the insight of the new materials. As well as giving the details of the Cedar City plan of attack, the new materials crack open the later decision of the “tan bark council” between Haight and Dame to realize the ultimate slaughter and provide significant evidence for Brigham Young’s contemporary ignorance of the massacre.
Beyond these new sources, the historiography of this volume is quite similar to Brooks (Mountain Meadows Massacre) and Bagley (Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows). Just as Bagley adds to Brooks, this volume tries to fill the quiver. Many times that leads to similar conclusions. Other times, and most obviously in the footnotes, there are large differences. This is especially manifest in the use of Mormonism Unveiled; or The Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee (e.g., 71-72, esp. notes 115 and 121). Elsewhere and in an example of the research team’s robust source criticism, the authors show that a critical Haight sermon, which was dated by both Brooks and Bagley to have been given in early September was actually delivered in late July (pg. 131, note 8).
Brad: That Haight sermon is an excellent example. Though we should note, in Bagley’s defense, that the alternate dating is based upon documents to which he did not have access (a letter from William R. Palmeer to Dabney Otis Collins in the “First Presidency, General Administration Files” of the Church History Library).
I’d like to move into another element of what makes this book’s contribution to our understanding of the massacre. The authors engage key theoretical strands in sociological literature on group violence. This is an analytical sphere that closely overlaps portions of my own theoretical training, so I was a bit disappointed in the lack of depth of their engagement. In the end, however, their analysis is not primarily sociological or anthropological. Their most important sources are Roy Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence, Ervin Staub’s The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, and Stanley Tambiah’s Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. They also cite Regina Schwartz’s The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, as well as a Deseret News article entitled “Killings in Iraq by ‘Bad Apples’? Probably Not,” with analytical perspectives drawn from the work of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram.
Based upon this literature they develop a heuristic model for answering one of the driving questions of their analysis: how did basically good men end up committing such a horrific atrocity? According to this model, there are three separate social factors that set the stage for enabling atrocities of this kind. 1) Actors allow “the dictates of ‘authorities’ to trump their own moral instincts;” 2) conformity — the unwillingness to act differently from ones peers; 3) the dehumanization of potential (and actual) victims. This approach is critical for getting to the bottom of the questions of How and Why. Earlier authors have either focused on demonstrating blame for the conspirators and actors but not adequately explaining why (Brooks) or fixed inordinate attention on the role of Brigham Young (Bagley), treating his complicity as furnishing the greatest explanatory power for the massacre, and, implicitly, relegating the actual murderers and local leaders to the role of mindless automatons, driven only by their obsession for vengeance-taking and their uncritical obedience to Young’s directives. And while this volume does address the question of Young’s direct complicity, it also frames the question differently, presuming that Young’s orders would not be enough, by themselves, to ensure the bloody outcome and that deeper, more localized and immediate context is required to account for Mormon participation in the slaughter.
But, one step at a time. First, the question of Brigham Young. The authors argue, in a nutshell, that while Young does shoulder a fair share of the responsibility for creating the tinderbox conditions within which the massacre could occur, there is no real historical evidence that he in fact set the spark by ordering, directly or cryptically, the massacre of the Fancher party. Bagley, who has most persuasively argued for Young’s ordering the massacre, lays down a case based primarily on two pieces of documentary evidence. First, John D. Lee - the only massacre participant to be convicted (and executed) for his crimes - penned a series of “confessions” which, after his death, his defense attorney, William Bishop, compiled and edited into a book, Mormonism Unveiled. In this book, Lee pins responsibility on Brigham Young who, he claims, sent George A. Smith to Southern Utah in advance of the Fancher party to cryptically order their destruction at the hands of Mormon settlers in cooperation with local Paiutes. The second piece of textual evidence Bagley cites is an excerpt from Dimick Huntington’s diary in which he describes a September 1 meeting between Young, Huntington, Jacob Hamblin, and several Indian leaders from throughout the territory. Young tells the Southern Utah Indian leaders that they can have all the cattle belonging to California-bound emigrant parties along the southern road.
J. Stapley: I’ll happily concede the sociology of violence terrain to you. However, I did notice that they seemed quite intent on making everything fit into their heuristic model. For example, fairly early in the narrative the authors claim that “for the most part, the men who committed the atrocity at Mountain Meadows were neither fanatics nor sociopaths, but normal and in many respects decent people” (pg. 128). While I’m not sure if they are using a clinical definition of sociopathy (as compared to psychopathy), the authors repeatedly highlight how the actors and circumstances feed the three impetuses you mention. At the same time Lee, who appears to sustain the brunt of the narrative’s causal weight, is portrayed precisely as a fanatic. Lee was a “religious zealot” who viewed the events as “God’s purpose” (pg. 144). He figured himself to be a “modern-day Joseph of Egypt,” an interpreter of dreams - a persona that Lee invoked to affirm the Piute shock troops’ resolution for battle (pg. 157-158). Further, the authors quote Samuel Knight who had intimate knowledge of the massacre as claiming that both Haight and Dame were “fanatics” (pg. 213).
Now, regarding Brigham Young, the new material in this volume does dismantle much of Bagley’s argument. Parshall and Reeve’s review of Blood of the Prophets in Mormon Historical Studies is where you see Bagley’s use of the Huntington diary excerpt shredded, and I didn’t see that the authors of this volume brought it up, though they treat the meeting. Mormonism Unveiled, they argue, was posthumously expanded by Lee’s attorney to implicate Young, a credible assertion considering the attorney’s pecuniary interest in the volume and Lee’s consistent and deathbed claims to the contrary. Still, the lingering question of Young’s involvement could be betrayed by his September 10th response to Cedar City, wherein he wrote, “In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away” (pg. 184). This sentence absolves Young only with the presupposition that Young knew nothing of the Mormon involvement in the first Fancher attack. Otherwise, it is simply a tactical instruction that has no moral or strategic prohibition on violence against the emigrants and even gives provisions for it. In my estimation, however, the evidence presented by the authors, virtually all of which is previously unpublished, indicates that Young did not know of the Mormon involvement with the immigrants.
The area where I see the authors insufficiently treating the subject material is the ever-popular “blood atonement” rhetoric of the Mormon Reformation (pg. 26). Only one moderate paragraph broaches the subject and no effort is given to contextualize or clarify the ramifications of the sermonizing. This lacuna is perhaps shaded by authors’ quotation of Heber C. Kimball’s words at the July 24 canyon celebration. They ultimately temper Kimball’s comments by not showing that the words immediately preceding those quoted, curse the US President and his staff in the name of Jesus and by the Mormon Priesthood (pg. 44). Is this a systemic perspective in the volume?
Brad: The blood atonement sermonizing was a surprising omission on the part of these authors. My sense is that Bagley and others correctly assess its overall significance, but misread how it actually figured into the social context for the massacre. Researchers, amateur filmmakers, and historians encounter the sermons in question and envision Mormons chomping at the bit to enact blood-letting vengeance on anyone remotely suspected of having been involved with Mormon persecutions or the murders of the prophets (the Smith brothers, Parley Pratt). But blood atonement was more about Mormon apostates than Mormon enemies. It was a rhetorical threat that loomed over those who would disregard the injunctions of Mormon priesthood and the imperatives of Mormon colonizing, a theological dressing-up of religious authority on the frontier, buttressed and enforced by violence - particularly during the Reformation of 1856-57. This radical and disturbing doctrine - preached up and down the Utah Territory by Young and other key Mormon leaders - contributed to the massacre, not by inculcating a murderous obsession for vengeance against imagined enemies in the Fancher party, but by ensuring an unwillingness on the part of the perpetrators to disobey their leaders.
The centrality of intensified authoritarianism in war-ready Utah territory is difficult to overstate. The book provides an illuminating example. The strategy that Young had implemented to put the Mormon kingdom on war footing included (in addition to a prohibition against selling supplies to traveling emigrants and decision to cease mediation between emigrant parties and local Indian tribes) a policy dictating that cattle be sent to Salt Lake for rationing. A group of Mormon settlers in Cedar City brandished guns in defense of their refusal to send their livestock North. They were threatened by local military leadership with execution for sedition in “a time of war” (pg. 63). Significantly, the men who carried out the attack, in addition to being Mormons, were members of the militia, and the conspiring orchestrators of the massacre, in addition to being their ecclesiastical leaders, were also their military commanders.
As far as the Huntington diary goes, it bears mentioning that at precisely the time when Brigham Young was ostensibly sealing the fate of the Fancher party (to paraphrase Bagley) by telling Indian leaders they could have the emigrants’ cattle, Haight and Lee were already conspiring with Indian leaders in and around Cedar City to attack the Fancher party and promising shared spoils. Of course, the fact that no evidence has been discovered directly implicating Young in the conspiracy (or the refutation of existing claims of such evidence) does not in itself constitute evidence that Young was not involved. Yet we should be careful not to ride that logic too far. Part of the appeal of the conspiratorial view of history - in addition to furnishing simple, often satisfying explanations for otherwise complicated and difficult-to-comprehend phenomenon - is that is governed by a circular logic that self-reinforces. When you look for mustache-twisting puppet masters pulling history’s levers, the absence of evidence can be taken as evidence of the hypothesized conspiracy. The logic is not just circular; it entails a reversal of evidentiary standards. The fact that actual evidence cannot be discovered, rather than leading to a revised theory of what happened, actually reinforces the theory for which evidence is elusive.
Part of the problem with focusing so single-mindedly on a very technical, legalistic question of Young’s complicity is that it sidesteps far more interesting and important questions. To what extent, for example, does Young bear responsibility for what happened even if he did not order the attack on the Fancher party or the massacre to cover it up? How do intensely hierarchical social structures become self-reinforcing and to what extent can the effects of panopticism account for what happened? If the massacre was perpetrated by good Mormons, many (if not most) of whom retained their good standing in the Church and their communities despite widespread knowledge of what happened, what does that mean for those of us who claim that religious and historical heritage? By emphasizing the on-the-ground run up to the massacre, the tensions that built between Fancher party members and local leaders, the authors offer a compelling (if not totalizing or comprehensively explanatory) narrative in which violent, escalating frontier conflict mixed with undeviating obedience, religious conviction, in-group/out-group dynamics, and war hysteria leads to a horrible crime that takes on a momentum of its own, leading eventually to a cover-up of staggering proportion and unimaginable wickedness. All of which was carried out by believably human, conflicted actors.
J. Stapley: Agreed. Concluding that Brigham Young did not order the massacre is a nice sound-bite, but authors don’t make much of an effort to detail the degree to which his actions and beliefs contributed to the three factors of violence that they use to explain the massacre. Your evaluation of the blood atonement sermonizing, for example, connects some of those dots.
Brad: I should mention what I consider to be a major weakness of the book. The authors go to great lengths to portray the Mormons involved in the massacre as complex human beings and historical agents, whose actions have explanations that, while defying rational or moral justification, do not defy basic understanding. This is a far more sophisticated reading of history than one in which the murderers figure only as the mindless tools of their insane, bloodthirsty prophet. The problem is that such sophistication is not really extended to the non-Mormon participants - the Paiutes who were convinced by Lee and Haight (among others) to attack the Fancher party to begin with and, after the extended siege, to help clean up the mess by slaughtering them in the most cowardly manner. The Indians in this account feel a little like Mormons in the Blood-Atoning-Brigham readings. That they would agree to what the Mormon leaders propose is taken almost as a given. No effort is made to understand how these basically good men participated in this atrocity. They are pawns in the hands of the insidiously manipulative Cedar City leaders. Subsequent scholarly treatments of the massacre, in my view, must do for the Indians what this volume has done for Mormon settlers: flesh out their motives and their behavior in ways that acknowledge their agency, their humanity, and the inhumanity of their actions.
I’ll end with my most tentative conclusion. As noted above, where some sources end and others begin is, at times, less than clear in this account. But based on my reading of the notes, my provisional conclusion is that the materials heretofore confined to the First Presidency vault dealt primarily with the scheming of Haight and Dame. This means that if the Church leadership deliberately and purposefully withheld documents relevant to the massacre from public scrutiny, it was in an effort to cover up the complicity of the Cedar City High Priesthood. Here it is appropriate to note that this is only volume 1 of 2, the second of which will deal primarily with the cover-up of the massacre. One assumes that volume 2 will be far less exculpatory for Brigham Young.
J. Stapley: I would say that the vault material is further reaching than Haight and Dame, but that there it is most dramatic. With the laborious and definitively not hasty publication of this volume, I do not have any expectations for the proposed second volume.
Never again will scores of researchers dedicate a decade to the massacre at Mountain Meadows. This is a life’s work compressed and the result is clear and exhaustive narrative. With a collection of sources spiked by previously unavailable material, the reader follows new paths in the story that has been walked by historians, antagonists and apologists with vivid and sometimes mistaken zeal. But was it worth it (consider the resources which were diverted from other projects)? Yes, though it is perhaps the Mormon people that will feel the greatest effects, not the academy. I don’t think that Mormons are any more ready now than they were a half a century ago. Juanita Brooks would have little to quibble over this book; but that the Mormon Church feels like it can now stand with her and allow its historians to tell the story the most truthfully they can, even facilitating the process, demonstrates that this is truly a new era. We now can remember the killers and the killed and be confident in the sentiments of the nineteenth-century LDS First Presidency: “We are anxious to learn all that we can upon [the Massacre], not necessarily for publication, but that the Church may have the details in its possession for the vindication of innocent parties, and that the world may know, when the time comes, the true facts connected with it” (xi).
With all future work on the massacre, historians will be required to consult Massacre at Mountain Meadows as the starting point. The volume reads mostly as if it were written in a narrative vacuum. However and fortunately, the authors, whether by their own volition or that of their reviewers, engaged some of the work that is now part of the bibliographic terrain. Bagley, Denton, Krakauer and those that will follow them may very well persist in their interpretations; but they must consider the careful evidence and analysis of Walker, Turley and Leonard.
Thanks for the excellent review.
It sounds as if this book will leave my central dissatisfaction with the Mountain Meadows literature intact: the failure to really take the social science literature on ethnic conflict seriously. If you really address the literature on the political activation of ethnic cleavages, Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball become the central, necessary condition for the massacre. With their framing of Gentile/Mormon relations in place, something like the massacre becomes a highly probable outcome.
Divisive rhetoric from leaders seems to be almost essential in turning latent cleavages into salient ones. Young’s and Kimball’s rhetoric was certainly intended to activate and politicize the cleavage, although not necessarily to result in violence. Although even that is problematic, since both leaders were preparing the people for total-war footing. It’s similar to what happened when Smith and a few anti-Mormons did the same thing in Illinois. And obviously individuals are responsible for what they do with the suddenly salient cleavage. But a very high percentage of rank-and-file people respond to such cleavages when framed in existential terms with violence. A friend of mine, Scott Strauss, has written a book about how this happened in Rwanda.
Next, the historical component of the perspective. These leaders had already lived through two serious basically ethnic wars that resulted from exactly this kind of heightened elite rhetoric: northern Missouri and the Nauvoo war. There seems to be some failure of moral and practical learning involved in Young’s and Kimball’s decision to take the same rhetorical route a third time.
This doesn’t make the Mormon leadership complicit in Mountain Meadows. But it does make them morally responsible in some ways. It also highlights a strange absence of introspection…
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 8:47 am
JNS, excellent points. The somewhat superficial engagement with relevant social science literature on genocide and ethnic violence is a shortcoming here. Historians are notoriously theory-allergic, so, on some level, I’m happy with any engagement at all. Certainly, at a minimum, Mormon leaders participated in the creation of a genocidal mentality, if unwittingly. But that (the unwitting part) is also a key feature of the relevant sociological theory. A genocidal mentality need not (and typically does not) entail genocidal intentions. It merely describes the social-psychological conditions within which genocidal acts on the part of ordinary people become possible and/or likely.
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 8:59 am
Excellent review guys. Very interesting stuff.
Like J., I don’t have high hopes of ever seeing volume 2. I suspect this is the last we’ll hear from the church on the topic, at least for this generation.
Comment by Randy B. — June 12, 2008 @ 9:06 am
Brad, right; genocidal situations are often created by leaders whose goals are entirely strategic. They try to bluff other elites into a change of course, or to obtain better border settlements, etc. The Mormon situation with respect to the U.S. government at the time seems to very much fit this paradigm. Young created a situation of conflict in order to win a better settlement, with more regional autonomy, vis-a-vis the U.S. federal government. The strategy got away from Young and the Mormon leadership in Mountain Meadows — but these strategies often, and predictably, do.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 9:08 am
I’m interested to see how this plays out in the coming months in terms of increasing access to previously restricted documents. I think the Church leadership is trying to be more open and applaud it.
Incidentally, Benchmark Books was taking preorders at MHA–not sure whether they still are, but I like giving more power to independent booksellers when possible.
I know one of the authors personally, and he’s a wonderful, thoughtful, faithful guy. I’m looking forward to seeing what he and coauthors were able to generate.
I personally am glad they didn’t go heavily into the theory of genocide because (with all due affectionate respect to bk/jns) I find that narratives get heavily derailed by theory. I think it’s better to have good, carefully researched and told stories and then have separate monographs for the heavy theory. Have the historians tell their stories and the theoreticians write their theoretical work.
Again, I really am glad for people to do theory, but I like to have it exist as a separate literature from the history, using the historical narratives as its raw material.
Comment by smb — June 12, 2008 @ 9:23 am
smb, the problem with narratives without theory is that they presume each event to be sui generis. This means that the narratives often end up distorted and missing vital parts of the event. Because the historical narrative is inevitably shaped by either implicit or explicit theory, it’s always better to have some kind of meaningful theory present in history. Otherwise, the history becomes informed by naive theory and lacks the details necessary to support up-to-date theoretical conversation.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 9:25 am
Thanks, as always, for the review. Amazon tells me my copy won’t ship till 11 Aug. It’s going to be a long summer.
Comment by Edje — June 12, 2008 @ 9:34 am
Thanks for the review. The situations seems similar to the “scenario fulfillment” that resulted in the Vincennes killing the 290 civilians aboard Iran Air Flight 655. It also would have fit right into a Joseph Conrad novel, along with The Rescue, Lord Jim, and Under Western Eyes, where the protaganist proves unable to hold together a delicate, unstable situation, and all ends in ruin.
Comment by John Mansfield — June 12, 2008 @ 9:40 am
Just a note that I have updated the review to include some information just received from the authors regarding the Jenson Papers and their slated publication.
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 9:40 am
Detailed and thought provoking review. Thank you. I cannot wait to read the book, after the years of build up.
I agree with Brad and JNS on the importance of theory. Even a straight forward text that seeming just tells a story relies on some sort of theory to connect the pieces of data into a story. It is a problem when that theory remains unexpressed and implicit, since it creates a shadow that is best handled through explicit discussion. Datoids do not connect themselves with out some kind of theory to make their encounter possible.
Having said that, I think good works can be written where the theory builds a foundation and stands to the side of a narrative.
It is good for Mormon history to begin a conversation with philosophers and social scientists through engagement with theory.
The social scientists cited on violence do not simply create theory, I imagine. Tambiah, and others, engage data to create their situations. Perhaps the issue here is both theory and comparison. It is good to bring the frame of Mormon history into comparison with other circumstances, such as those in South Asia that Tambiah relies on.
Comment by david knowlton — June 12, 2008 @ 9:44 am
Is genocide the right term here?
Comment by john f. — June 12, 2008 @ 9:49 am
As one who is not usually interested in Utah history, I thoroughly enjoyed this review.
Thank you.
Comment by Ben — June 12, 2008 @ 9:53 am
Very much enjoyed this, Brad & J. The above comments have also been fascinating.
Comment by sister blah 2 — June 12, 2008 @ 9:57 am
Yes, john f., it is genocide. Brigham Young intended to kill all the Gentiles in America. And he cleverly concealed his intentions by sending the message in code (”you get Gentle cattle, wink, wink”) to those bloodthirsty killers of the West, the Paiutes. Young’s restrained approach to the campaign against the US Army in the north was just more clever concealment of the heretofore unrecognized Genocide Strategy. No doubt that’s what was in the missing Hamblin pages — yet more proof for you stubborn doubters.
Brad and J., nice review.
Comment by Dave — June 12, 2008 @ 10:00 am
Thank you for the helpful and interesting review, Kramer & Stapley. A question remains in my mind: Ten years of work, the input of hundreds of readers and researchers, millions of dollars spent–why is the book so short (231 pages)? I don’t see how a book of that length can do the subject justice.
The terse prose, the cursory review of blood atonement rhetoric, the limited attention to social science, the modest engagement with previous scholarship–were the authors working within severe length constraints imposed by Oxford?
Comment by Justin — June 12, 2008 @ 10:03 am
Dave, that’s a funny comment but what would your serious answer be?
Comment by john f. — June 12, 2008 @ 10:03 am
Genocide is probably not the right word. Mass murder is.
To put this in Laymans terms BY is not directly responsible for the massacre unlike Lee, Haight and individual gunmen both white and Indian.
BY bears some I think limited responsibility in helping create an environment where local leaders like H & L felt it was OK to attack a perceived enemy like this.
Comment by bbell — June 12, 2008 @ 10:10 am
Kramer,
I’m interested in the Paiute motivations. Other than Brigham Young telling them that they can have the Fancher cattle and horses, is there any source material that might shed light on this?
Comment by blt — June 12, 2008 @ 10:13 am
Thanks for the thorough review, guys. I look forward to reading the book.
Comment by Christopher — June 12, 2008 @ 10:13 am
Maybe massacre is the right word, not genocide or mass murder, although the latter might be a plausible alternative.
Comment by john f. — June 12, 2008 @ 10:14 am
PS–Nice job, guys.
Comment by blt — June 12, 2008 @ 10:14 am
Thank you for the thoughtful review.
Some commenters need to write their own books to expand the research and conclusions of the authors. Had those authors been writing to the narrow slice of hopelessly academic audience represented here with your in-group vocabulary and specialized requirements, Oxford would have sold 142 copies, and the rest of the audience — the slack-jawed droolers like me — would be left with glazed eyes and at the mercy of Bagley and Krakauer.
(I would insert smileys to soften that but it irritates Steve. So please have the charity to read with the image of your kindly but hopelessly clueless sweet auntie before your eyes — the one who offers you homemade chocolate chip cookies along with the scolding.)
Comment by Ardis Parshall — June 12, 2008 @ 10:16 am
blt, note that Young’s indian policy wasn’t that clear-cut and it was Lee (with Haight’s backing) that incited the Piutes to violence.
Justin, fortunately I think this book is but one of the fruits of the MMM research. We have more publications to look forward to. Though I agree that having the George Q. Cannon diaries out would be a tempting alternative.
RE: genocide. I am no theoretician, but there does seem to be an ethnic character to the violence that isn’t captured by “murder.”
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 10:20 am
Ardis as a “slack-jawed drooler.” I’m not sure what that would make me…but it would not a pretty sight.
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 10:21 am
That’s a very good insight, Brad.
Thanks for the review, you two. This sounds like an invaluable addition to the literature. Though I’m with Justin, really — it sounds like there were also some surprising oversights, in a book that could have been even more.
Comment by Kaimi — June 12, 2008 @ 10:22 am
Great review!
I hope that this book represents the ascension of Brooks’ approach to Mormon history to near official policy. Hopefully, we will never again hear leaders say that all history must be faith promoting or that some truths are unimportant.
Comment by DKL — June 12, 2008 @ 10:23 am
J.
You’re right. Young’s policy was not that clear-cut. I’m just trying to get a handle on why–at least in Kramer’s estimation–the Paiutes are portrayed so two-dimensionally. I’m wondering if there is source material that could flesh them out. If so, are these authors neglecting it?
Comment by blt — June 12, 2008 @ 10:28 am
J., although I believe that it is a stretch to say that there was an ethnic characteristic to the violence, accepting that point for the sake of argument, an ethnic characteristic does not make something genocide, or at least I don’t think it does.
Comment by john f. — June 12, 2008 @ 10:28 am
Stapley: I don’t think the GQC journals has to be either/or. I met the guy doing those the other day, and he is not taking part in any of the MMM stuff anymore. Turley is doing volume 2 on his own.
Comment by Ben — June 12, 2008 @ 10:30 am
Where did we get the 231 page count? The bibliographic cite J. and B. dropped into the post says 448 pages, which may mean that, like with RSR, a lot of the good stuff is in the endnotes, not the text.
Comment by Dave — June 12, 2008 @ 10:34 am
Agree with Ardis’s comment on the appropriateness of the book for a general audience. However, I think continuing the story to Lee’s execution (or some endpoint) in another 100 pages or so would have been far preferable to saving it for another volume. I can’t imagine there will be an appreciable non-scholarly audience for volume 2.
Comment by John Turner — June 12, 2008 @ 10:35 am
Great review, guys. I was especially surprised that the book is as concise as it is. The number of researchers and the wealth of sources had left me imagining this would be another 800+ page, dense megatome, of the type Mormon Studies seems to frequently produce.
Comment by John Hamer — June 12, 2008 @ 10:39 am
Dave, in the proofs that we received, there were four appendices and the notes covered pgs. 271-383. The 448 pages came from Amazon.
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 10:43 am
Great review. Thanks.
Perhaps the problem here is similar to the one that plagued earlier accounts of the MMM–lack of important source material. I’m willing to bet that there’s a lot more primary material on the Mormon settlers (journals, letters, interview notes, etc.) than there is of the Piute participants. There may never been enough direct historical data to really do the kind of treatment you’d like to see.
Comment by BTD Greg — June 12, 2008 @ 10:47 am
Thanks guys. This is a good sampler to prime us for August.
I too am disappointed that the authors did not deal more adequately with the issues of vengeance and blood atonement. I think I know part of the reason why. At a lecture at BYU, I asked Ron W. how he would deal with the question of how being victims of religious violence contributed to becoming perpetrators of religious violence. Ron responded that while the authors did try to answer that question, they did not want to give the appearance of making excuses for the Mormon perpetrators. I understood that to mean that Mormons have been “blaming” the massacre for so long on the early persecutions and ultimately not taking responsibility for the horrible atrocity that they themselves committed in 1857.
I understand the authors’ reasoning, but I ultimately think that it ends up dodging a major contributing factor in the massacre. Although Brad is right that blood atonement was for the most part about apostates, there is also evidence that the imagery and language of blood atonement was also applied to discussions of the murderers of JS and the prophets.
In 1861, JDL recorded BY saying that the Fancher party was related to JS’s killers, so at least retroactively BY believed that the massacre was God bringing vengeance and “atoning” for JS’s death. I think it’s also important to point to the abundance of statements made by LDS leaders in the years after 1838 and 1844 that admonished forebearance and patience, and enjoining the people not to seek vengeance on their own, but to let God do so. There were two competing vengeance strains in Mormon thought at the time that need to be further explored by historians.
Comment by David G. — June 12, 2008 @ 10:48 am
David G., the authors actually do a good job of treating the forbearance and patience.
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 10:53 am
Whether there are reams of documentary sources on Piutes or not, their participation in the massacre needs to be carefully studied in terms of their oral traditions about the massacre (One can look at Forrest Cuch’s book–A History of Utah’s American Indians– as a beginning here. One also needs to carefully assess the ways in which Piute life was reworked with the coming of the Mormons and their understanding of the Indian agent’s activities. There is important work among American Indian and non-Indian historians on relevant matters outside of Utah that provide a framework to begin such a work. From my perspective the Piute story is a huge gap in the MMM narrative.
Comment by david knowlton — June 12, 2008 @ 10:54 am
Good to know, J.
Comment by David G. — June 12, 2008 @ 10:55 am
DK, it looks like you have your next project. Keep us updated as you proceed.
Comment by john f. — June 12, 2008 @ 11:05 am
This is a fine review. I think it gives us all good reason to read the book ourselves, comparing with the others already out there, and working to come to some tentative conclusions about the massacre.
I was surprised our reviewers said nothing about how this book corrects or may help to correct impressions about the massacre and Mormonism’s relationship to violence raised by Helen Whitney in what with hindsight now looks like a pretty sloppy documentary.
I believe that taking a step back from the massacre might help us understand the paradox of otherwise good people engaging in acts of unspeakable violence. If we go back to Carthage, Illinois and the conspiracy that resulted in the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and the subsequent expulsion of Mormons from Nauvoo we have an interesting parallel.
In this case, leaders of local communities, perceiving a terrible threat to their well-being, determined to get rid of Joseph Smith. They wrote inflammatory articles in the local papers, called for violence against Mormons, included the Governor of the State, however unwittingly, in their plan, got help, again unwittingly from William Law and the Nauvoo Expositor, and then got the Carthage Grays to finish the job.
After the dust settled, the major conspirators were brought to trial and by a kind of jury nullification, found innocent of the murders. The conspirators went on to become very important members of a community that went on the flourish. The men were respectable and effective leaders. There was nothing about their later lives to suggest that they were evil through and through.
I suspect that the American West has more stories of this sort.
My point is that Brad has just scratched the surface of the complex sociology and psychology of violence along the American frontier. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films have all just come out on DVD in a set. Eastwood very effectively explores America’s need for sudden outbursts of violence to cleanse and protect civilization threatened by unknown or not entirely understandable outside forces. Were Haight and Lee Dirty Harry? Were they the Zodiac Killer? What about Thomas Sharp? Wyatt Earp? Jesse James? The citizens of Northfield, Minnesota?
Comment by Neal Kramer — June 12, 2008 @ 11:15 am
Superb review, gentlemen. I am very disappointed that the aftermath is in a separate volume. Who agrees with Randy B. that we’ll never see it?
Comment by Ann — June 12, 2008 @ 11:17 am
John F., RE genocide, here’s a legal definition from Article 2 of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:
Mountain Meadows may certainly be a less-than-perfect example of genocide; there was clearly no intention to destroy the entire ethnic group of Gentiles. But there was equally clearly intention to destroy a specific group of Gentiles for reasons of ethnic conflict. Furthermore, the forcible transfer of children that followed the massacre heightens the genocidal aspect of Mountain Meadows.
Even if we don’t regard Mountain Meadows as an instance of genocide (a position that I think is sensible; it’s a difficult definitional debate and there are sound arguments in both directions), the theory of genocide is relevant. That theory, along with the broader literature on ethnic violence, represents an impressive body of work on the conditions under which normal people do killings like this. Since that was a stated, central question in this volume, at least some serious interaction with this literature would have been beneficial.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 11:18 am
Neal, I can’t help but notice that your account of inflammatory rhetoric in the Nauvoo conflict is really one-sided. Mormons did give as well as take in the rhetorical escalation game there.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 11:20 am
JNS, thanks, that’s the exact definition I had in mind and with which I am very familiar. MMM simply was not genocide by that definition. That’s why I asked it perhaps “massacre” was a better term than “genocide”. Turning it into genocide seems to take an unnecessary step in accepting blame. Mormons can be ashamed that some of their people committed a massacre 151 years ago without having to sign up to genocide as well.
Comment by john f. — June 12, 2008 @ 11:24 am
Excellent review and I loved the format. What a great way to treat books like this.
The point about the Indians not being treated robustly is an interesting one. I know there have only recently started to be better studies on the interactions of native Americans and Mormons with the Indians fleshed out. I hope to see more of those sorts of studies especially in the context of the Utah war.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 11:25 am
Ethnic conflict, JNS? This is interesting. If Mormons are an ethnicity then disparaging criticism of Mormons leaves the realm of protected speech and enters the uncertain area of law and public opinion relating to smearing people based on immutable characteristics — such as ethnicity.
Perhaps the Mormon settlers’ conflict with non-Mormon settlers wasn’t an ethnic conflict but rather was simply bad blood between religions gone seriously wrong, informed by misconceptions about past wrongs (i.e. believing that members of the Francher party were boastful about having been party to the past persecutions of Mormons back in the United States).
Comment by john f. — June 12, 2008 @ 11:29 am
Great review. Thanks.
Comment by Ray — June 12, 2008 @ 11:30 am
Beware ordering from Amazon. For whatever reason a lot of LDS booksellers aren’t getting product to Amazon. I ordered volume 3 of Blake’s theology series way back in April and Kofford still hasn’t gotten supplies to Amazon. I’m still waiting. Ditto At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 11:30 am
JNS, I actually agree a lot with what you say (#1) however it would seem logically to follow that the group with even more responsibility than Young and Kimball would be newspaper editors and the Republican leadership in Washington who were doing all they could to demonize Mormons.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 11:34 am
Not to get too far off on a tangent, but to Clark’s comment in #47, is volume 3 from Blake available anywhere yet? I had just assumed Kofford was behind schedule. Also, I got my copy of At Swords Point from Amazon several weeks ago.
Comment by Randy B. — June 12, 2008 @ 11:39 am
Whoops. Should be Clark’s comment in #48.
Comment by Randy B. — June 12, 2008 @ 11:40 am
Brad, someone else mentioned this comment of your and I am curious as to how you would contextualize it in larger contexts.
If Young was preparing for a war (and I think it amazing that full on hostilities never really occurred) then shouldn’t we contextualize his approach to a larger military context? That is can one look at Mormon authority and rhetoric encouraging obedience in a way separate from how rhetoric to Federal troops was organized?
It seems to me that the comments of Mormon leaders in the 1850’s are taken in the context of peaceful religion without conflict whereas a more reasonable context is war.
Now what is the rhetoric in the 19th century (or heck contemporary Iraq) during wartime of troops?
I’m not saying this recontextualizing is entirely fair. There are some differences. But I think that military context is unfairly neglected in the sociology of the history. (This is one reason why I think a military history of 19th century Mormonism is long, long overdue and a much needed component to understand our history)
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 11:42 am
John F., I’m far from the first to suggest that 19th-century Mormonism was an ethnic community as well as a religious one. Among others, Jan Shipps has argued this. Indeed, Mormon leaders themselves described Mormons as a “people,” language that is fundamentally ethnic in character. By the 20th century, when the laws you’re referring to came into existence, Mormonism probably had lost much of its ethnic character.
Regarding the definition of genocide, I think you’re wrong to say that Mountain Meadows flatly does not meet the definition. Given the legal definition of “in part,” which requires attention to the scope of plausible action of the participants, a plausible argument could be made that Mountain Meadows meets the definition. It’s clearly a contested argument, but a one-sided answer like yours strikes me as a bit more defense attorneyish than reflective.
In any case, Brad’s usage of this term in this context is standard among students of violence. Whether you find it helpful or not, normal analytic usage of the term “genocide” regularly includes acts like Mountain Meadows.
Clark, I agree that the newspaper editors and so forth are at least as much to blame for the overall situation of conflict. However, it’s dubious that those editors did as much to shape the worldview of the killers as did Young and other Mormon leaders. Here’s the thought experiment: if the Mormon-Gentile cleavage
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 11:44 am
Randy, Blake told me that the initial run sold out the first week and that they are awaiting a reprinting from Kofford. It sounds like they did a very surprisingly small run (500 books) given the popularity of Blake’s series. As to why they still haven’t completed the second run I don’t know.
As to why MacKinnon’s Utah War book isn’t available I don’t know. In the same thread as the above he said it should have been available from University of Illinois Press and wasn’t sure why it wasn’t. I just checked Amazon for both books and they still aren’t available.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 11:46 am
(continued from #53) hadn’t been in the forefront of Cedar City Mormons’ minds, and the interactions in question had been framed as relationships among American citizens, would the Cedar City folks have wanted to kill? I find that hard to imagine.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 11:47 am
JNS - what’s more interesting is that they sometimes described themselves as a race. (I can try and find the quote if desired)
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 11:47 am
JNS, the reason I think newspaper editors and more prominently those Federal leaders setting up the Utah War created the problem is that they created the situation leading Young to create the Mormon/Gentile divide in the terms they did. It’s quite analogous to how many blame Bush for the ethnic cleansing in Bagdad by creating the environment.
You ask if “the interactions in question had been framed as relationships among American citizens” would they have wanted to kill? But who was it who was saying the Mormons weren’t just American citizens. It was the Federal authorities and newspaper editors who saw the Mormons as treasonous.
Note that I’m not absolving Young of blame here. And certainly his words were heard more by the conspirators than the eastern newspapers. But Young’s actions can only be understood in the larger context and it was that larger context that creates the particular divide that Young uses.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 11:51 am
Randy B., I have Blake’s volume 3 on my bookshelf. I got it through the FAIR bookstore (fairlds.org; the bookstore link will be on the left).
Thanks for the great review, guys. I too am curious about the brevity of treatment; like Justin, I had been under the impression that this was going to be an 800-page beast.
I’m looking forward to reading it (I signed up on Benchmark’s list at MHA).
Comment by Kevin Barney — June 12, 2008 @ 11:56 am
Thanks for that info Kevin. I’ll give them a call this afternoon and see if they have any remaining in stock.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 12:04 pm
Clark, I think that makes sense, and I agree that the broader U.S.-Mormon conflict needs to be considered here. That said, I remain interested in the lack of learning by Young, who as I mentioned earlier lived through two similar conflicts and twice experienced the negative results of playing along in the escalation game.
I would certainly agree with any assessment that characterizes the Utah War as a horrible failure of leadership by both Mormon and U.S. elites. I would equally agree that both sets of elites are responsible for Mountain Meadows, in a way that is obviously different from the responsibility of the direct participants but nonetheless very real.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 12:09 pm
John,
It’s also worth pointing out our review and my subsequent comments did not describe the massacre as genocide. Instead, I used the term “genocidal mentality” — a technical term from the social theory that undergirds genocide studies — as a possible way to describe the mindset that enabled the mass killings:
I should clarify here what I meant by “cover-up of staggering proportion and unimaginable wickedness.” The cover up is the massacre itself. They massacred everyone (except those too young to tell tales) because Fancher party members had seen that Mormons were in fact participating in what was supposed to be an Indian attack (the initial attack on the party that led to the siege).
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 12:10 pm
I ordered At Sword’s Point from bn.com and received my copy on April 22.
Comment by Justin — June 12, 2008 @ 12:20 pm
Clark,
Not to get off topic, but Bush hired Rumsfeld, who hired Bremmer, who ordered de-Ba’athification.
Comment by blt — June 12, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
I take the point of these commenters complaining that some of the characters still remain one-dimensional. But I think the problem in fact goes deeper, to the problem of explaining evil. What happened here was evil, but why?
I don’t think any historian has provided a satisfactory answer to that question, no matter the particular historical canvas they are working on, be it My Lai, Eichmann in Israel, Gulags, and so on, it seems that the closer you look the more ordinary and unexceptional evil seems.
And yet simple human decency revolts at the “banality of evil.” Anything but that! If evil is ordinary, then it might be possible that I could be evil. That possibility is too painful to admit. Much more comfortable to point and apportion assiduously argued convictions of evil people.
In other words, the more comfortable explanation of evil is that evil is done by evil people. If we can show that the people who commit atrocities were themselves evil, then we have a nice, pat explanation. Whether it be JD Lee, or Brigham Young, or the Indians, or the Fancher party who “had it coming,” it doesn’t matter. But if any of these “guilty” parties were in fact ordinary people, and otherwise decent folks… well, the implications are too horrifying to consider.
So we get a nuanced book like this one, or like Kramer and Stapely provide in their review of this book, and then you see in the comments many people instantly revert to mining these narratives for how to assign blame and prove who was evil and who was innocent.
Solzhenitsyn says it best:
Comment by Jeff Bennion — June 12, 2008 @ 12:35 pm
Jeff Bennion, I can’t speak for anyone else in these comments, but I’m not sure how easy it is to identify anyone who is innocent in relation to Mountain Meadows.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
BLT, I wasn’t referring to deBaathification but rather the move the past two years to make communities in Bagdad ‘ethnically’ uniform. Although there does appear some involvement by military leaders to accept such ethnic cleansing - although the evidence on that is still somewhat controversial. It offers a lot of parallels though to the Utah situation (including the question of what an ethnic group is)
Anyway my plea for history done in terms of larger military understanding remains. The question is whether there are any Mormon historians versed in such fields that could write such a tome.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 12:39 pm
Clark #53,
Part of what the authors show here is that Mormons and Indians viewed Mormons and Americans as very different. Emigrants grazed their cattle in Mormon fields. Mormons claimed the pasture belonged to them, emigrants claimed ownership as Americans. Indians called emigrants Americans and Mormons Mormons. Mormons played on this distinction as a way to shore up Mormon-Indian alliances in preparation for the war. The discourse that divided Mormons from Americans came from all sides.
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 12:40 pm
Great review guys. I really enjoyed this report.
Comment by Matt W. — June 12, 2008 @ 12:55 pm
Oh, and as for two dimensional indians, are there any journals available from indians of the time we can use to honestly flesh out the indians. I think the best we can do is acknowledge that the mormons of the time viewed the indians as two dimensional beings and that is all the source data we have…?
(please correct me if I am wrong here)
Comment by Matt W. — June 12, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
That’s a fair point, Matt. Due to the nature of textually based historical reconstruction, no portrayal of the Indians in this case can ever be as fleshed out or multi dimensional as the Mormon actors. But there are still improvements to be made. I believe that Tom Alexander is doing some groundbreaking research in this vein.
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 1:00 pm
We have some good examples in various disciplines of creative ways to give voice to traditionally voiceless groups like the Indians in Utah history. David Knowlton mentioned some of this research above. I’d also point, in Mormon circles, to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s work with “ordinary” women in American history. Each traditionally silenced group gives rise to its own set of challenges in doing research, but the fact that there are challenges is no excuse for failing to try.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 1:03 pm
Clark, I need to read this book when it becomes available, but I agree with you that the military aspect needs to be considered. Here’s a description of the Small Wars Journal blog about current naval conflict in the Strait of Hormuz that sounds pretty familiar:
Comment by John Mansfield — June 12, 2008 @ 1:11 pm
this may be a lame, uninformed question but what was the purpose of the authors of the book? was it to tell the story, having access to these documents that weren’t available to historians previously? Is it to act as semi-official Church stance on MMM? is it just their own academic research? What’s their motivation?
Comment by amri — June 12, 2008 @ 1:14 pm
Amri,
My sense is that it was twofold: 1) to deal with the question of how basically decent Mormons could perpetrate such an atrocity based on access to new and highly relevant sources, and 2) to put together something like a semi-official Church position on what happened and who was responsible (in spite of the fact that their conclusions are far from definitive).
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 1:17 pm
Brad, is #1 because they think none of the other research does that?
Comment by amri — June 12, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
#1 has more to do with the new sources, unfettered access, etc. than anything. Brooks took a similar approach, but had much less to work with, both in terms of relevant documents and support from the Church.
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 1:26 pm
When you get and read “Massacre at Mountain Meadows,” I suggest that you think about it alongside Ardis Parshall’s earlier “UHQ” article ” ‘Pursue, Retake & Punish’: The 1857 Santa Clara Ambush” and Chapter 12 (”Lonely Bones”: Violence and Leadership)of “At Sword’s Point, Part 1.” MMM was not an isolated act confined to a single part of Utah; there were other murders or attempted murders in other parts of the territory just before and just after MMM, involving in some cases an overlapping cast of characters.
Comment by Bill MacKinnon — June 12, 2008 @ 1:41 pm
Thanks for dropping by Bill; I agree that that is very important context. I would also add your JMH article from last spring (correct me if I am wrong on that date). In the interest of space, we didn’t get to all the details that we might have. For example, the authors discuss Ardis’s UHQ article but ultimately equivocate. I think Ardis’s research stands up quite excellently to the recent critical readings of it.
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 1:45 pm
I agree; thanks for the citations, Bill. The broader context of Mormon violence in Utah at the time underscores the point that Brad and I were drawing from theory: the framing of the Utah War situation by Mormon leadership made acts of violence by Mormons highly likely.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 1:51 pm
Bill, since you dropped by, any word on when your book is making it to Amazon? See my #54.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 1:59 pm
Were a bunch killed or just one? Sorry, I have never heard this story before.
Comment by StillConfused — June 12, 2008 @ 2:52 pm
Per:
“That Haight sermon [Brooks, 52] is an excellent example. Though we should note, in Bagley’s defense, that the alternate dating is based upon documents to which he did not have access (a letter from William R. Palmeer [sic] to Dabney Otis Collins in the “First Presidency, General Administration Files” of the Church History Library)”
I did in fact find Palmer’s argument for an earlier date in his papers at SUU–in the document I saw, he said it was a July 24th homily. While I trust President Palmer as implicitly as I do murderers’ statements given 35 years after the event to a church official, his date doesn’t make sense, given that Haight talks about Gentiles “asking us to trade with them”: there weren’t any Gentiles around on the 24th, nor would he have known about an “army to exterminate us.” So I stuck with Brooks.
And as for Paiutes, what Paiutes? How do the Brethren handle Carleton’s 1859 report that Mormons, not Paiutes, attacked the train?
“It was currently reported the Mormons at Cedar City, in talking among themselves, before the troops ever came down south (when all felt secure of arrest or prosecution), and nobody seemed to question the truth of—that a train of emigrants of fifty or upward of men—mostly with families—came and encamped at this spring at Mountain Meadows, in September, 1857. It was reported in Cedar City, and was not, and is not doubted—even by the Mormons—that John D. Lee Isaac C. Haight, John M. Higby (the first resides in Harmony, the last two at Cedar City), were the leaders who organized a party of fifty or sixty Mormons to attack this train.”
Comment by Will Bagely — June 12, 2008 @ 3:47 pm
1. A comparative view that is theoretically informed is appropriate. Heavy theory though ends up in my experience being a cart before the horse problem. Potentially brilliant work has frequently been derailed by excessive attention to theory. The other issue is that when theory is used to write the initial story, it becomes a circular self-perpetuating system. You need the good initial account before applying the theory.
2. I remember earlier that all the buzz was that the authors were being forced to whittle an absolutely sprawling book into something salable. I have a memory of >800 pages about a year ago. I personally prefer shorter, better written books to the sprawl-fest of the longer ones. Save the very long work for the anthologies and publications of primary documents.
3. Ethnic cleansing and genocide, it’s tricky. A lot of people are glad to write about ethnicity for Mormons, mostly as a way to explain how odd it is that Protestant-seeming people are so different from Protestants. What’s different about the Mormons was that the ethnic border was exceedingly dynamic. Thomas Kane was ethnically included but not Mormon, while apostates lost their ethnic status promptly, and miners could be brought into the fold.
4. Paul Reeve is the scholar to watch for Mormons and Indians. Try his first book for an initial glimpse at how to start to work on these issues (it’s reviewed in the forthcoming JMH).
Comment by smb — June 12, 2008 @ 3:56 pm
SMB, I’ve had his Making Space on my “to buy” list for a while now.
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
smb, I’m not sure the cart and the horse are separable here. If theory isn’t used carefully in constructing a narrative, the narrative is likely to attribute causal significance to factors that are not causal. In addressing a fundamentally causal question, as this book sets itself the task of doing, theory is of the essence; facts just don’t generate good causal inference on their own. You need theory to help decide which aspects of reality belong in the initial account. This is circular to some extent, but that’s inevitable. All data are always theory-laden, as the philosophers of science remind us. If we ignore theory in building our narratives, that just means we end up using slap-dash implicit theory, not that we get away from theory…
I agree on the length. It’s a relief to see someone leave something on the cutting-room floor.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 4:18 pm
I’ve just read too much theory that is impossibly separated from facts, relies heavily on the appearance of scientism without similar experimental reproducibility and reads like someone parroting a 1960s linguistics textbook after having too many drinks with an edition of Freud. Some theory is certainly required, but I’m not persuaded that academic “engagement” with theory is required for writing history.
I do agree that there are people who do theory wonderfully, and I don’t mean a blanket statement here (I sound more strident than I am), but I do urge significant circumspection.
Comment by smb — June 12, 2008 @ 4:50 pm
Clark, the book’s a great read for buffs of Mormon and American and Indian history.
Comment by smb — June 12, 2008 @ 4:54 pm
Thanks for stopping by Will. I don’t see anything in that excerpt of the Carleton report that contradicts Walker, Turley and Leonard’s evidence and analysis.
Regarding the Haight sermon, the authors’ explanation in 131n8 is that Brooks’s source for the sermon was Palmer (her citation was for a record in the LDS Archives, which was never there). Palmer claimed that Brooks got the material from him, and that she had “her meetings mixed” and that the sermon “was not aimed at any traveling party but rather at the coming Johnston’s Army.”
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 5:09 pm
Stillconfused (#81), if you mean the actual massacre, the death toll was well over 100.
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 5:13 pm
Catching up, but I still am trying to figure out #93’s “Mormon-Gentile cleavage”.
Comment by Ray — June 12, 2008 @ 5:45 pm
Meant to type #53 - not #93.
Comment by Ray — June 12, 2008 @ 5:45 pm
All sorts of images spring to mind Ray, but I’m not going there.
Great review. I’m looking forward to the release.
Comment by kevinf — June 12, 2008 @ 6:04 pm
“I don’t see anything in that excerpt of the Carleton report that contradicts Walker, Turley and Leonard’s evidence and analysis.”
Look harder.
Did a “party of fifty or sixty Mormons” attack the Fancher train? Or did they disappear? Or were they magically transformed into Paiutes?
Will
Comment by Will Bagley — June 12, 2008 @ 6:15 pm
SMB, I think philosophers call this the hermeneutic circle. They’d argue that you can never escape from it you can just delude yourself that you have.
Put simply you always are already in theory. The point of the circle is to use theory to understand data and then use that new understanding to critique theory. As you do this ideally you’ll know more. Of course there’s a debate whether this proceeds like a spiral or more like a pinball in a pinball machine (which arguably isn’t a real circle at all).
Comment by Clark — June 12, 2008 @ 6:16 pm
Will, are you really wanting to get into proof-texting? Do you want me to respond with an interpretation and then raise you a Jimmie Pete oral history? It is just that I am not particularly interested in the game.
Comment by J. Stapley — June 12, 2008 @ 6:34 pm
Will, it is interesting that Palmer dates Haight’s sermon as July 24th. If he’s right, that does rule out the approaching Army as its object. On the other hand, I don’t see why it could not apply to other emigrant parties, since I presume the Fanchers were not the first to take the Southern road that summer.
As far as the question of Paiute involvement, I think you’re tilting at windmills here. You seem to assume that arguing for Indian involvement somehow, in the minds of “the Brethren” or Mormon readers, lessens the criminality of Mormon actions. That couldn’t be farther from the truth, at least in the case of this book. Indeed, my chief complaint about the book was that it made those few Indians who did participate into mindless tools in the hands of evil and conspiring Mormons. The authors here treat Indian involvement as axiomatic, but this in no way shields the Mormon conspirators or militiamen from culpability. From Appendix D:
The Appendix goes on to list 25 Indians who “may have been associated with the massacre” and 5 who were “not involved.” Appendix C lists 68 militamen who can be fairly definitively said to have participated in or witnessed the massacre.
I’m having a hard time figuring out how someone who considers the Huntington diary (Brigham ordering Indian leaders to massacre the Fanchers) a smoking gun can simultaneously consider the Carleton report to be definitive evidence of Indian non-participation. These conspiring Brethren have no possible motive for implicating Indians in participation in the massacre.
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 7:29 pm
Again, from Appendix D (where they cite Carleton):
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 7:38 pm
If he’s right, that does rule out the approaching Army as its object.
Not absolutely. Mormons in Utah were well aware of the formation and plans of the army long before it took up its march. The army plans had been talked about in the newspapers for weeks, and those papers, along with plains gossip about the army assembling at Leavenworth, had been brought to Utah by lots of travelers early in the summer. BY refers to the expectation of the army’s coming in his outgoing letters before this time. The July 24th news was only significant because it announced that the army had in fact left the frontier and would reach Utah that year instead of wintering over in Leavenworth as had been the hope.
Comment by Ardis Parshall — June 12, 2008 @ 7:58 pm
#90: Ray, are you serious or making an anatomy joke? Just in case you’re serious, what I have in mind here is a social cleavage; Lipset and Rokkan offer a nice definition, but the basic idea is a fundamental division in how people within a society think about themselves. An ethnic cleavage, arguably like the Mormon-Gentile cleavage of the 19th century, is just an abiding division in social identities related to people’s subjective lineage, culture, and religion.
These cleavages appear as objective reality when they are socially and politically activated. However, that they are really basically socially constructed is evident from the fact that a near-infinite number of possible cleavages exist in any society, and the vast majority are not remarked on. For instance, note the profound lack of social enmity in America between tall people and short people…
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 12, 2008 @ 8:09 pm
Jay, he was making an anatomy joke.
Comment by Steve Evans — June 12, 2008 @ 8:26 pm
Well, it could be an embryology joke.
Actually, since cleave is one of those words that is its own antonym, it’s possible that ethnic cleavage could be the process of ethic groups joining tightly together.
Comment by Left Field — June 12, 2008 @ 8:33 pm
Thank you for the clarification, Ardis. Your perspective here sheds considerable light.
Comment by Brad — June 12, 2008 @ 9:08 pm
JNS, It was an anatomical joke, but I also recognized the conflicting meaning the term could have had. I knew you meant division, but the phrase could have meant cooperation - taken in isolation out of context.
Given the possibilities, I couldn’t resist.
Comment by Ray — June 12, 2008 @ 9:37 pm
All,
What a great discussion of fascinating history from leaders in the field. MMM truly is a topic where even the professionally and intentionally dispassionate get excited. It has been a thrill to watch this thread develop.
Comment by Randall — June 13, 2008 @ 4:42 am
Nice review. I agree with most of what Brad wrote about blood atonement, but I am having a hard time with this statement:
“but by ensuring an unwillingness on the part of the perpetrators to disobey their leaders.”
My understanding is that blood atonement would only apply if several conditions were met. 1) The wrong-doer had to commit a unforgiveable sin like murder innocent blood which would require punishment in this life or the next life, punishment that couldn’t be circumvented merely through repentance and drawing on the Saviour’s atonement. 2) The wrong-doer had to have a high level of accountability, say have his calling and election apparently made sure prior to the wrong. (ordinary apostasy and disobeying orders is not sufficient here) 3) The wrong doer had to voluntarily submit to capitol punishment with the idea that punishment now was better than punishment later. (What apostate would want to volunteer? If blood atonement is voluntary, how can it pressure involuntary order following? As per requirement #1, disobeying would be the safer route to take.) 4) A Millennial government would have to be established first. No GA endorsed occurence of blood atonement ever occurred in practice, so how fear inducing could it really be?
Comment by Keller — June 13, 2008 @ 5:31 am
Keller, your outline sounds as though formal procedures, clearly taught and fully understood, were in place. Nothing so formal existed.
Blood atonement was preached over the pulpit for a few months during the fall and winter of 1856-57, in a few sentences within longer sermons on many other subjects. It was not written down except as transcription of talks — there were no formal written articles explaining details that had been left out of the verbal sermons, nor anything for members to read and study. None of the sermons that I’ve seen mentioned anything at all about a millennial government (which the Saints of 1856-57 thought they were establishing anyway), or about any particular authority needed by someone to implement blood atonement — some of the remarks even spoke about husbands “atoning” their wives. Most of those at a distance from Davis/Salt Lake/Utah counties didn’t hear sermons directly from any general authority — they heard it from “home missionaries” who had no better understanding than the general population, or they heard it second or third hand from their settlement leaders who had heard it in Salt Lake and brought it back to, say, Parowan and preached their understanding, not necessarily what had really been taught in Salt Lake.
Under those conditions, if you were guilty or even suspected of just about anything at all, can you be sure you wouldn’t be a little bit afraid of that wacky neighbor of yours, the one who is a little more fanatical than usual, who has a gospel hobby of calling down damnation on the unrighteous and who yells at your kids for walking on his lawn? If you really were an apostate, or a non-Mormon traveler who only heard rumors of that new and outrageous Mormon doctrine, would you be sure you were safe?
Comment by Ardis Parshall — June 13, 2008 @ 6:40 am
Ardis, are there any internal primary sources suggesting how your argument may have played out for Latter-day Saints? Or is it mostly stuff in the spirit of JCB, who in Nauvoo claimed the Danites or Danite-remnants were actively attempting to assassinate him?
Clark, I’ll have to post on critical theory sometime. What you’re saying is formally but in some sense I think merely trivially true. I hew to something of a religious phenomenology in getting the “story” out, emphasizing to the extent I can an attempt to communicate what I think participants would have believed to be true in language comprehensible to a current audience. Once that attempt has been made, I think then a theoretician can come in to weave a broader narrative, pursue a specific agenda. Because so little is reproducible in anything resembling an experimental mode, theory heavily determines outcome, particularly when it is specifically the goal of an endeavor.
Comment by smb — June 13, 2008 @ 6:50 am
smb, I haven’t seen anything like what I think you are asking about. There is plenty of evidence that suspicious people were watched, but no internal discussion, to my knowledge, about sending anybody to do what could remotely be considered a “Danite operation.” With a couple of hours to search my files, I could offer a dozen or more examples of letters between people who were congratulating themselves, or diaries of people who were commenting on the otherwise inexplicable behavior of others, by quoting the line “the wicked flee when none pursueth.”
I really do think there was a more or less deliberate plan to rid the territory of undesirables of all kinds by blood and thunder sermons, or by jumping around a corner and yelling “Boo!” if such people showed signs of being fearful. I do not believe there was a deliberate plan in SLC to commit even a single murder — but that doesn’t mean that a few, some, or many people didn’t go away from some of the sermons believing they had a license to “purify Zion” by any action they chose to take.
Comment by Ardis Parshall — June 13, 2008 @ 7:36 am
any people expressing secret doubts but afraid to voice them over fear of retribution?
thanks for indulging my ignorance of the Utah period.
Comment by smb — June 13, 2008 @ 7:40 am
LOL! Thanks, Ardis.
Comment by Mark IV — June 13, 2008 @ 7:58 am
Concerning other blood atonement murders, or Danite operations, if you prefer, I’m a direct descendent of Polly Bullock, whose second husband, Jesse Hartly, was killed by Wild Bill Hickman on orders of Brigham Young. He was taken up a canyon and shot. This has always been known by the (incredibly staunchly Mormon) family; the story continues that Polly never got over it. A great-uncle spent a good deal of time trying to prove, unsuccessfully, that Jesse ran off.
Comment by djinn — June 13, 2008 @ 8:09 am
Mark IV, you caught me!
smb, there are reminiscent accounts about displeasure with the catechism, and going along to get along. Records like the ones you’re asking about would be more likely, I’m guessing, to have been kept or created by those who left the Territory than by those who stayed, and I can think of a couple of those right off. One was by Frederick Loba, a Swiss emigrant who completely rewrote his history after leaving Utah, and who gave newspaper interviews about how fearful he was, and how the only way to save his neck was to flee Utah rather than to speak up.
djinn, if I were to claim publicly that my brother had been murdered by someone “on orders of Mr. Djinn,” you would be well within your rights to ask for my evidence for that accusation, and to demand an apology (or more) when I couldn’t produce the evidence. So I’m asking on behalf of Brigham Young — what’s your evidence? (And did you know, Hope Hilton’s book notwithstanding, that there is no instance — none, zero, zilch, nada, not one — of any 19th century use of the sobriquet “Wild Bill” Hickman? One of my personal tests for credibility of an historical claim involving Hickman is the use of that name.) Not that you aren’t repeating your family lore faithfully — but family lore can and often is both wrong and irresponsible.
Comment by Ardis Parshall — June 13, 2008 @ 8:17 am
But I love the name “Wild Bill” Hickman; he confessed to the murder and there is at least one other contemporaneous account–at least of someone reporting that Polly Hartly told her that Jesse was killed on order of Brigham Young.
Comment by djinn — June 13, 2008 @ 8:27 am
djinn, you are talking with Ardis Freaking Parshall. Do you really want to offer that evidence to HER?
Comment by Ray — June 13, 2008 @ 8:29 am
smb, I think your religious-phenomenology work is excellent. But like any other mode of research, it has its limits. Some questions just can’t be successfully answered by reproducing some best guess of how participants understood events. In particular, causal “why” questions as opposed to interpretive/motive “why” questions can’t be answered by a phenomenology approach. When a work is motivated by a causal question, as the review above suggests that this work is, phenomenology is the wrong tool for the job.
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 13, 2008 @ 8:51 am
djinn, we’ll skip over the anonymous “somebody” and her gossip, and jump to this: how would Polly Hartly know that Brigham Young gave such an order? Did he write her a letter telling her so? Invite her to his office to be present when he gave the order? Send her the videotape of his meeting with Hickman?
That’s all I’m saying — just because gossip is old doesn’t make it true.
/s/ Ardis Freaking Parshall
Comment by Ardis Parshall — June 13, 2008 @ 8:56 am
Ardis, that’s just your epistemology. Mine is that gossip is truth incarnated in the world. All other evidence is to be evaluated in light of gossip; my eyes may be deceived, but never my chatty neighbor…
Comment by J. Nelson-Seawright — June 13, 2008 @ 9:00 am
What is history? If the murder occurred, it was in 1854. She (Mary Ann Polly Bullock Hartly Roberts) wrote an account (or at least told someone who actually wrote down her words) accusing Hickman of killing her husband on orders of the prophet in 1858; William Hickman’s account was written in 1871. The two accounts dovetail, but reasons for the murder are different, indicating to me, at least that it is not a matter of one person repeating a story heard from another. The missing he (Jesse Hartly) went missing at the right time, never to again appear. Doesn’t some of this count as something close to evidence?
Comment by djinn — June 13, 2008 @ 9:12 am