On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter.
Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping narrative offers fascinating new insight into why Mormons settlers in isolated southern Utah deceived the emigrant party with a promise of safety and then killed the adults and all but seventeen of the youngest children. The book sheds light on factors contributing to the tragic event, including the war hysteria that overcame the Mormons after President James Buchanan dispatched federal troops to Utah Territory to put down a supposed rebellion, the suspicion and conflicts that polarized the perpetrators and victims, and the reminders of attacks on Mormons in earlier settlements in Missouri and Illinois. It also analyzes the influence of Brigham Young's rhetoric and military strategy during the infamous "Utah War" and the role of local Mormon militia leaders in enticing Paiute Indians to join in the attack. Throughout the book, the authors paint finely drawn portraits of the key players in the drama, their backgrounds, personalities, and roles in the unfolding story of misunderstanding, misinformation, indecision, and personal vendettas.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. Neither a whitewash nor an expose, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history."

On September 11, 1857, a group of Mormons aided by Paiute Indians brutally murdered some 120 men, women, and children traveling through a remote region of southwestern Utah. Within weeks, news of the atrocity spread across the United States. But it took until 1874 - seventeen years later - before a grand jury finally issued indictments against nine of the perpetrators. Mountain Meadows Massacre chronicles the prolonged legal battle to gain justice for the victims. The editors of this two-volume collection of documents have combed public and private manuscript collections from across the United States to reconstruct the complex legal proceedings that occurred in the massacre's aftermath. This exhaustively researched compilation covers a nearly forty-year history of investigation and prosecution - from the first reports of the massacre to the dismissal of the last indictment in 1896. Of special importance in Volume 2 are the transcripts of legal proceedings against John D. Lee - many of which the editors have transcribed anew from the shorthand. The two trials against Lee led to his confession, conviction, and ultimately his execution on the massacre site in 1877, all documented in this volume. Historians have long debated the circumstances surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, one of the most disturbing and controversial events in American history, and painful questions linger to this day. This invaluable, exhaustively researched collection allows readers the opportunity to form their own conclusions about the forces behind this dark moment in western U.S. history.

The long-awaited follow-up to the groundbreaking Massacre at Mountain Meadows Published in 2008, Massacre at Mountain Meadows was a bombshell of a book, revealing the story of one of the grimmest episodes in Latter-day Saint history, when settlers in southwestern Utah slaughtered more than 100 members of a California-bound wagon train in 1857. In this much-anticipated sequel, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown examine the aftermath of this atrocity. Vengeance Is Mine documents southern Utah leaders' attempts to cover up their crime by silencing witnesses and spreading lies. Investigations by both governmental and church bodies were stymied by stonewalling and political wrangling. While nine men were eventually indicted, five were captured and only one, John D. Lee, was executed. The book examines the maneuvering of the defense and prosecution in Lee's two trials, the second ending in Lee's conviction. Turley and Brown explore the fraught relationship between Lee and church president Brigham Young, and assess what role, if any, Young played in the cover-up. And they trace the fates of the other perpetrators, including the harrowing end of Nephi Johnson, who screamed "Blood! Blood! Blood!" in his delirium as he was dying, more than sixty years after the massacre. Turley and Brown also tell the story of the massacre's few survivors: seventeen children who witnessed the slaughter and eventually returned to Arkansas, where the ill-fated wagon train originated. Vengeance Is Mine brings the hitherto untold story of this shameful episode in Mormon and Utah history to its dramatic conclusion.

On September 11, 1857, a group of Mormons aided by Paiute Indians brutally murdered some 120 men, women, and children traveling through a remote region of southwestern Utah. Within weeks, news of the atrocity spread across the United States. But it took until 1874 - seventeen years later - before a grand jury finally issued indictments against nine of the perpetrators. Mountain Meadows Massacre chronicles the prolonged legal battle to gain justice for the victims. The editors of this two-volume collection combed public and private manuscript collections across the United States to reconstruct the complex legal proceedings that occurred in the massacre's aftermath. The documents they unearthed, transcribed and presented here, cover a nearly forty-year history of investigation and prosecution - from the first reports of the massacre in 1857 to the dismissal of the last indictment against a perpetrator in 1896. Volume 1 tells the first half of the story: the records of the investigations into the massacre and transcriptions of all nine indictments, eight of which never resulted in a trial conviction. Volume 2 details the legal proceedings against the one man indicted to go to trial, John D. Lee. Lee's trials led to his confession and conviction, and ultimately to his execution on the massacre site in 1877, all documented in Volume 2. Historians have long debated the circumstances surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, one of the most disturbing and controversial events in American history, and painful questions linger to this day. This invaluable, exhaustively researched collection allows readers the opportunity to form their own conclusions about the forces behind this dark moment in western U.S. history.

On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter.
Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping narrative offers fascinating new insight into why Mormons settlers in isolated southern Utah deceived the emigrant party with a promise of safety and then killed the adults and all but seventeen of the youngest children. The book sheds light on factors contributing to the tragic event, including the war hysteria that overcame the Mormons after President James Buchanan dispatched federal troops to Utah Territory to put down a supposed rebellion, the suspicion and conflicts that polarized the perpetrators and victims, and the reminders of attacks on Mormons in earlier settlements in Missouri and Illinois. It also analyzes the influence of Brigham Young's rhetoric and military strategy during the infamous "Utah War" and the role of local Mormon militia leaders in enticing Paiute Indians to join in the attack. Throughout the book, the authors paint finely drawn portraits of the key players in the drama, their backgrounds, personalities, and roles in the unfolding story of misunderstanding, misinformation, indecision, and personal vendettas.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. Neither a whitewash nor an expose, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides theclearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history.

Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott Library Fact, Fiction, and Polygamyrescues an exciting true tale of international intrigue from 150 years of neglect. It tells of the travails of Henrietta Polydore, a young Anglo-Italian girl spirited out of an English Catholic convent school in 1854 and bundled across the Atlantic, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountains by her Mormon-convert mother and aunt to live in Salt Lake City under an alias in the polygamous household of a Latter-day Saint leader with five wives and twenty children. Midway through Henrietta's secret sojourn in the City of the Saints, she was caught up in the Utah War of 1857-1858, President Buchanan's attempt to suppress a perceived Mormon rebellion with nearly one-third of the U.S. Army. MacKinnon and Alford present Henrietta's story through their editing for twenty-first-century readers of a "lost" non-fiction novel about Polydore's saga published during 1877 in Boston's Atlantic Monthly. This short piece-dubbed a "novella" and titled The Ward of the Three Guardians-was the work of Albert G. Browne, Jr., a Boston Brahmin with two Harvard degrees and a Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg, who, at age twenty-three, was in Utah as the war correspondent for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. Browne reported on and then became part of Henrietta's story using his legal training to bring about her repatriation to her father in England through a sensational legal case. Her return home precluded an early, perhaps polygamous, marriage as a teenager. Fact, Fiction, and Polygamy is the work of two historian-editors with disparate backgrounds working collaboratively as professional colleagues as well as personal friends. MacKinnon, an independent historian from upstate New York now living in California, is a Presbyterian, veteran of the U.S. Air Force, and former vice president of General Motors Corporation. Colonel Alford, a Latter-day Saint and Utahn, is a professor teaching at Brigham Young University after a thirty-year career as a U.S. Army officer with teaching assignments at the U.S. Military Academy and National Defense University. MacKinnon and Alford have brought their decades of research on the subject to bear on a re-publication of Ward that helps readers separate Browne's telling of Henrietta's story into its strands of fact and fiction. Sit back and savor Albert Browne's newly recovered tale and its rich blend of fact and fantasy. With the guidance of editors MacKinnon and Alford, determining the difference is half the fun and much the value of revisiting The Ward of the Three Guardians. Number Seventeen in the Series Utah, the Mormons, and the West Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott Library