Review
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Title: Vengeance Is Mine: The “Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath
Authors: Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Barbara Jones Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Historical, narrative history
Binding: Hardcover
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 520
Audiobook Time: 17 hours, 29 minutes
Price: $34.95 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0195397857 (Hardcover)
Reviewed by Greg Seppi for the Association for Mormon Letters
Introduction
With perhaps the exception of the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and the arrival of the Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Valley, no single event overshadows discourse about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The ruthless murder of men, women, and children by Latter-day Saints casts a pall over Church history. As with so many other situations where an oppressed community returns violence, it experienced in earlier generations to others, confronting the Mountain Meadows Massacre requires me as a reader to look within myself and consider how I might respond to a similar situation; the question arises, “Lord, is it I?”
This new work by former Assistant Church Richard E. Turley and Director of Signature Books Barbara Jones Brown delves into the details of the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre with care and great attention to primary sources. In this review, I use the term “Church” in lieu of the full title of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to save space. I also may use the term “Mormon” as a period-specific shorthand for Church members living in 19th-century Utah. Vengeance is Mine builds on the work first commenced in Massacre at Mountain Meadows. Indeed, this book can be seen as the culmination of over a century of research into one of the most problematic events in Church history.
The book’s preface situates the text within the context of prior efforts (including the authors’). It also addresses LaJean Purcell Carruth’s transcriptions of the shorthand records from the two John D. Lee trials and “passages from other legal proceedings and additional types of records” (p. xv). The Preface also mentions www.mountainmeadowsmassacre.org, which includes the transcriptions recently produced by Carruth and numerous other primary source documents. As such, this book and the parallel website should prove extremely useful for undergraduate research classes and perhaps early graduate students grappling with historiography and primary sources.
Ultimately, this book is in conversation with a number of other books, including Unveiled, or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee (Written by himself) (which Vengeance’s authors find significant fault with), Will Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets, Juanita Brooks’ The Mountain Meadows Massacre, Sally Denton’s American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, and Massacre at Mountain Meadows. While having read other publications on the massacre will help readers understand the significance of Turley and Brown’s work, Vengeance is highly readable because it focuses on journals, letters, official reports, and the voluminous material on the massacre gathered by generations of Church archivists at the Church History Library in Salt Lake City. Because the authors rebuild the massacre from the ground up, so to speak, readers should be able to easily slip into the flow of the narrative. Though Vengeance acknowledges previous theories about the massacre regularly, the authors deploy their meticulously gathered research data to discard many traditional explanations. It is this care in utilizing primary sources to re-establish the facts of the massacre and its aftermath that make this the most important book in Mormon Studies produced this year.
Readers familiar with other works on the massacre will find that Vengeance is Mine is interesting in its deemphasis on the murder of Apostle Parley P. Pratt in Arkansas in 1857. The authors could not find any contemporary accounts from Latter-day Saints mentioning Pratt’s death as a motive for the murder. Instead, the authors place increased importance on the general Mormon campaign to make Utah unsafe for emigrants to California. By describing attacks on another wagon train crossing Utah at the same time, Turley and Jones suggest, in my mind, that (1) if there had been orders from Salt Lake to kill the Baker-Fancher train, those orders likely should have applied to other emigrants crossing Utah at the same time; and (2) that the violent rhetoric coming from Salt Lake City with regard to the oncoming American army and the general threat to “Mormon” settlements from this army led Mormons living in Southern Utah to interpret instructions from Salt Lake City not as suggestions to harass emigrant companies but to destroy them if possible.
Structure and Content
The book largely revolves around the experiences of “Gentiles” investigating the massacre for the territorial judiciary, Brigham Young, Jacob Hamblin, and five of the most notable massacre participants—John D. Lee, Isaac C. Haight, William H. Dame, Nephi Johnson, and Philip Klingensmith. While numerous characters flit through the book’s pages, these figures seem to be the most commonly mentioned. The book follows the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre into the 1880s, with some discussion of its aftershocks in the 1890s and 1900s, as well as its continued impact today.
Vengeance opens by describing the plural marriage of sixteen-year-old Sarah Priscilla Leavitt with thiry-eight-year-old Jacob Hamblin in Salt Lake City. It then intersperses this event and others in Salt Lake City with the set-up and execution of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, focused through the lens of the actions of John D. Lee. The authors switch perspectives back and forth between Leavitt, Hamblin, and their marriage, counterposed with the violence at Mountain Meadow. The first chapter closes with some discussion of the seventeen children who survived the massacre being brought to Rachel Hamblin. The book does not hold back from describing the children’s wounds. The violence wrought by Latter-day Saints against the Fancher wagon train is sickening. While the men were shot, it seems that many of the women and older children were brutally murdered by whatever weapons were on hand, including rifle butts and knives. It remains difficult for me to imagine the awful mix of social pressure, cultural obedience to military and local church leaders, fear of outsiders, and individual personal flaws required to convince men to do this, but do it they did.
The self-righteous post-massacre excuses developed by communities in Southern Utah, promulgated by First Presidency member George Albert Smith, and tacitly accepted by Brigham Young helped hide the extent of the militia’s guilt for roughly the next fifteen years. Brigham Young remains a key figure throughout the text—from discussions of his violent rhetoric to his actions as governor to his activities as the leader of the Church, Brown, and Turley closely examine Brigham Young’s relationship to the massacre.
I would not go so far as to state that their research exonerates Brigham Young from complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but their thorough analysis of Lee’s early report blaming Native Americans for the massacre and its influence on the Church’s institutional response to the massacre is highly significant because it goes a long way to explain a curious lack of curiosity regarding the massacre. Though the authors do not explicitly state as much, it seems likely that Young’s close relationship with Lee led him to place too much trust in Lee’s account of the massacre. While other reports about the massacre reached Brigham Young over the following twenty years, it was Lee’s confession and being caught out in his various lies about the massacre in the late 1860s that seems to have reframed the Church’s approach to the massacre, leading to Lee and fellow massacre perpetrator Philip Klingensmith’s excommunications.
Conclusion
The authors’ discussion of attempts to prosecute the perpetrators is perhaps the most significant new findings in the book. Based on the shorthand minutes of Lee’s trial recently translated by LaJean Carruth and drawing from other journals and histories from the 1850s through the 1870s, the failure to prosecute massacre participants other than John D. Lee becomes much more clearly a failure of the territorial government and local judges and prosecutors to effectively investigate the massacre. From funding problems to the chaos of the Civil War to attempts to use the first Lee trial as a de facto trial of Church leadership instead of actually prosecuting massacre participants, as a reader, I felt a great deal of frustration regarding failures to properly investigate the massacre. It is possible that Turley and Jones do not go far enough in questioning why Church leadership during the 1860s and 1870s failed to take greater action against massacre participants by conducting their own investigations of the event, especially as it became increasingly clear that the “official” history provided by Lee and the militia leadership, including Isaac C. Haight and William H. Dame, did not tell the full story. As the authors themselves note, however, “Many Mormons would close ranks to protect their own—even criminals among them—from outside forces they saw as unfair and anti-Mormon, particularly federal forces” (182).
Church leaders in Salt Lake City did not look more closely at the stories coming out of southern Utah for a variety of reasons explored in the text. Given the “cold war” between Church officials and anti-polygamy territorial officers alongside those who had left the Church or wanted to leave it, along with all of the other day-to-day work occupying their time, an investigation from Church headquarters could have been seen as frivolous, a waste of time, or divisive at a key time in Church history. Turley and Brown are able to show that Lee and other massacre participants or sympathizers promulgated false reports regarding the settlers’ behavior, including poisoning a dead cow “left” for American Indians and “boasting” about being murderers of the prophets (stories promulgated by Lee and other massacre participants after the fact, Turley and Jones argue). Given these stories and the level of trust placed in men such as Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee, what would have driven further investigation?
Turley and Jones ultimately argue that it was an 1870 letter from southern Utah written by Erastus Snow and Lorenzo Roundy, which reportedly “’communicated to President Young the facts’ about the massacre’ as we had learned them, and the sources of information’” which motivated Church leaders to take a closer look at Lee and others’ participation in the massacre (p. 252-253).
Readers today may not understand just how fraught with difficulties any investigation carried out by Church leadership would have been. By adopting a passive approach to the massacre and insisting that the territory judiciary and other government appointments take the lead, investigators were hamstrung by local politics and a lack of funds, including their failure to take Brigham Young at his word when he offered to order Latter-day Saints to testify regarding the massacre. This commitment, made in the late 1850s as the role of Latter-day Saints in the massacre was just emerging, was only taken up by territorial investigators in the 1870s—and Brigham seems to have followed through on this commitment, though many who could have testified evaded efforts to gather them up. One might suggest, however, that Brigham Young and other Church leaders did not follow through on this commitment sufficiently, and that history would think better of them if they had proactively attempted to bring massacre participants to justice.
One of the more interesting sections of the book follows the incredible efforts of the superintendent of Indian Affairs in Utah, Jacob Forney, assisted by Jacob Hamblin, to return the seventeen surviving children to their relatives in the East. Mention of these children and their eventual return to their families in Arkansas are among the most interesting in the volume, though (appropriately, given the focus of this work) the text does not follow each of them beyond their return to family members in Arkansas. Though reports of a male or female child having been “disappeared” after making offhand remarks identifying one of the murderers involved in the massacre are common in Utah lore, Turley and Jones argue convincingly that seventeen children survived the massacre, and seventeen were returned East. Forney is perhaps the only bright spot in the book—someone more concerned with the welfare of children than religion or politics.
While Vengeance Is Mine adopts a formal, academic tone, it is rarely dry and should appeal to any Latter-day Saint curious about the Church’s role in the massacre and its consequences. Because of the enormous quantity of supporting primary sources made available by the authors and others online, history teachers and professors may find this work and the web content mentioned in the introduction to be excellent material for students to use when studying why primary sources matter. I would say that anyone connected to Latter-day Saint studies should have this book on their bookshelf by the end of the year—it is no exaggeration to say that all historical studies of the Mountain Meadows Massacre converge in Vengeance is Mine.