The Blackmark: My Faith and the Mountain Meadows Massacre

It's a mystery that never needed to be one. I've known about it since I grammar school; yet my fellow Saints express shock and horror even as they engage in a twisted apologetics as they react to this heinous event--as though denial were a litmus test for determining one's Saintliness. Perhaps some suggest I use sensational terms? I suggest that those who believe so are, at best, ill-informed.

The events of that day need no retelling here; a fine book to be published over the next month will be discussing that in its fullest detail. The question I address: what is the faithful Latter-Day Saint--one who is faithful to both the present-day Church as well as his pioneer forebearers--to make of this terrible massacre? Was the supposedly peaceful Latter Day Saint faith of the 19th century simply window-dressing for a violent ideology of Christian-esque jihad? Furthermore, and more immediately relevant, what have we done with the memory of the victims? We must come to grips with our past if we are to engage a modern world in an information age.

I dare not try to quantify my stance on this issue into a series of premises/hypotheses for in doing so I run the risk of treating this as a geometric proof, as a problem distant from the hearts and minds of our people. It must not be so. While hard-headed evidentiary analysis is as necessary here as discussing issues like "barley in America," we must not trick ourselves into thinking that such an approach is sufficient for the descendants of those children who lived through the massacre (all adults over the age of seven were killed; the children were taken in by LDS families). We must ask if Jesus would deconstruct the tragedy in such terms...if he would offer shotgun responses and quick, easy answers. As I recall, when faced with death (and this death was of a far more natural cause), he offered no answers. He only wept.

But alas, I must enumerate the issues in some way...if this is not to be another emo-filled post about coming to grips with our past (tomes have been written on the subject; I will not burden you with more). So I pose tihs question to you, my friends, and hope to ffer some insight on it...

Was 19th-century Mormonism a violent faith masquerading as an empire of peace?

Whether authors talk of the Danites, blood atonement, or the Mountain Meadows Massacre, this is a favorite theme...that Mormons were really throat-cutting, tyrannical fanatics who saw the outside world as infidels...we were the "Mahomedians" of the American West. How much truth is there to it?

I am willing--though not particularly inclined--to entertain the notion that Mormonism indeed had a violent streak...but as Elder Packer has noted, such streaks must be taken within their proper context...as a product more of time and place than of theology. It is true that this period was marked by tremendous religious zeal on the part of the brethren, Jedediah Grant and Brigham Young in particular (though some research by Paul Peterson suggests that this zeal was far more pomp than circumstance). Part of these teachings were that certain individuals had committed crimes so heinous (adultery, murder, and some theft) that atonement was only possible by the shedding of one's own blood. Therefore, it has been supposed, Brigham Young sent vigilantes such as Bill Hickman's Danite Band to rid them of apostates (though the obvious presence of prominent apostates like T.B.H. Stenhouse and William Godbe argue against such a theory). Was this general doctrine taught widely? When one strings together all the comments made about it, then it might seem as though it was in the spirit of the age--and a rather bizarre spirit at that. Critics, both then and now, make this teaching into a method of retribution against apostates--merely the product of a power-crazed theocracy. Hence Mountain Meadows...

Yet I ask students of this to simply strip away the religious language from the principle and ask themselves if it sounds much different than how any cabal would view its territory. When we have areas even now where landowners see their land as property, it is a tragic reality that the American West was a hard-scrabble place where death over a card-game was not unheard of. Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes that in the 19th-century South, duals over honor were engaged in if only for the mere amusement of it. While there has been some debate over the role of violence as a general cultural norm in the West, it is nevertheless quite documentable that the vigilante group was harbored within frontier areas (which even extends back to the Whiskey Rebellion). Vigilantism derives from the concept of popular sovereignty, that the voice of the People is the voice of God. While I need to do more research on the subject, the frontier has traditionally been associated with such vigilantism...it is not unreasonable to suppose that the vigilantism that had such a place in Gentile culture (indeed, in the death of Joseph Smith) would easily carry over to the Mormon frontier. Mountain Meadows then was traditional vigilante action carried out with a religious banner...

Elsewhere in the west, violence in cattle towns has been alternatively described as prevalent, limited, and tolerated--depending on the historian (see Bonnie Christensen, 2002 and Richard White, 1991). The historian runs into problems in actually defining "homicide," given the cultural norms about "justified" killings on the frontier (see Thomas Noel's review of Robert McGrath's work for his argument that "justified" killings did not constitute "homicide" to the Western authorities). Since the Mormons had inherited a siege mentality from their reception in Missouri and Illinois already--where they saw first-hand the effects of vigilantism--it is tragically unsurprising that these values would be juxtaposed on the virgin wilderness.

The key here is that the theological rhetoric was more the product of a convergence of Mormon theology about repentance, the isolation of Utah Mormons, and the cultural heritage of vigilantism. What is jarring to the modern ear is the theologizing of violence...modern ears are relatively desensitized to the idea of a violent West. Otherwise, stealing horses, land disputes...hardly what we could call capital crimes--often brought on a lynching (Bill Longely and James Averell are both notable examples of this). The violent streak in Mormonism, if there was one at all, was not unlike the violence of its time. If it acted like a sovereign power unto itself, as Bushman has noted, it's because the state governments had treated them like foreign aliens. Given the violence elsewhere, the number of deaths in other frontier states dwarves the number of deaths in Utah...only the case of Thomas Coleman, a black man, shows the key elements of such execution...and his was a case where he flirted with a white woman. Sadly, in such cases, we have racism mingled with vigilantism all in the language of a theoretical doctrine. And aside from the belief that a man's blood must be shed (thus Utah's use of the firing squad), we have no instances of this "blood atonement" being actualized as a policy of the state.

And most importantly, if such a violent streak were a real element of Brigham Young's personality, then the Fancher party provided the ideal opportunity for its fullest expression. Yet he demurred, sending them that telling note via Jonathan Haslam ("Let them alone..."). If blood atonement were the real source of this killing, then the perpetrators might have sold it to him as such, and he might have accepted it. Yet he did not. There is much, even abundant, guilt in this matter...but we do the dead no service by placing it at the wrong feet.

So can a believer recognize a violent streak in Mormonism and still call himself a Mormon? Yes...absolutely. No faith...not Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian...is without one. We can be proud of pioneer forebearers, we can mourn their failings...but let us not believe that we must forsake them. Our faith is strong in spite of this horrendous act...we can condemn it with a clear conscience.