Fact-checking Mormon History: Did Brigham Young order the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

6 min readSep 13, 2015

This week, as America mourned those lost in the terrorist attacks of 9/11, some Mormons quietly remembered another tragedy that took place on the same day 144 years earlier: the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a group of Mormons militia members killed about 120 men, women, and children in cold blood.

Anti-Mormons have long claimed that Mormon leader Brigham Young ordered the massacre. Most recently, Will Bagley made this case in his 2002 book, Blood of the Prophets.

On the other hand, Mormons have insisted that the massacre was perpetrated by local members acting without sanction from headquarters.

Historical Background

Church descriptions of the massacre typically begin by pointing out that it took place as the United States was sending a small army to impose the Federal will on Utah Territory. But let’s back up a little farther to see why.

After fleeing hostile forces in Missouri and Illinois, Mormons settled in the Salt Lake Valley under Brigham Young and from there established colonies all over the West as well as in Mexico. When the United States claimed sovereignty over the area in 1848, Mormons petitioned Congress for recognition, and in 1850 the United States organized Utah Territory. Appointed governor by President Millard Fillmore, Brigham Young was able to continue imposing his will on the territory politically as well as ecclesiastically.

Just six years after the murder of Joseph Smith and five after the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo, Young was in no mood to accommodate outside interference with governing the Saints as he saw fit. He was ordained “king and priest” by the Council of Fifty, and acted accordingly. Apostle Heber Kimball went even further. “[Young] is not only the president here but he is the president of the states and kingdoms of this world no matter if they have not elected him.” In a very real sense, Brigham Young was the law.

Young extensively promoted his theology of blood atonement, which held that certain crimes and sins were so vile that they could not be forgiven until a debt had been paid in blood. This applied to countries as well as individuals. Young considered all of the United States culpable for the death of Joseph Smith, and added an oath of vengeance to the Mormon temple endowment: “You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children’s children unto the third and fourth generation.”

Tensions with Federal Officials

When Filmore appointed non-Mormon judges for Utah, tensions arose quickly. Young denounced Justice Perry Brocchus as “either profoundly ignorant or corruptly wicked” soon after his arrival, and ultimately all three federal officers gave up hopes of effective cooperation and left the territory.

In 1852, Young publicly acknowledged Mormon polygamy. Although it would be ten more years before Congress officially made polygamy illegal, this provided further conflict with federal officials. Justice John F. Kinney was appointed in 1854, and quickly fought with Young over statutes designed to protect polygamists.

Also in 1854, President Franklin Pierce attempted to replace Young as territory governor, but nominee Edward Steptoe declined, explaining that he could not perform his duties in the face of “fanaticism in the mass of the people and a religious oligarchy.”

By 1857, with Young’s approval, the territorial assembly sent a blunt warning to incoming U.S. president James Buchanan. If Washington continued to appoint “office seekers and corrupt demagogues,” Utah’s citizens would “send them away.”

The Utah War

Faced with this blatant insubordination, Buchanan ordered an army of 2,500 troops to Utah to install Alfred Cumming as the new governor. Hearing this, Brigham Young preached fiery sermons encouraging the saints to “lift the sword and slay them.”

Tensions were further inflamed when news reached Utah around this time that early church leader Parley P. Pratt had been killed by the estranged husband of one of Pratt’s polygamous wives while he was on a mission to the Eastern United States.

In August 1857, Young reactivated the Nauvoo Legion, a militia first created in pre-exodus Illinois.

The Massacre

A wagon train of around 120 emigrants, mostly families from Arkansas, was bound for California. The emigrants passed through Salt Lake City in early August, and headed south. In early September, they stopped to rest at Mountain Meadows.

On September 4, Mormon stake president and major in the Nauvoo Legion Isaac Haight ordered Legion member John D. Lee to lead an attack on the company.

On the 7th, Lee attacked with militia men and some Paiute Indians he had recruited. The emigrants fell back to a defensive position, and the ambush became a siege.

Following Haight’s orders, Lee negotiated a cease fire with the wagon company on September 11. In return for surrendering their weapons, the emigrants would be allowed safe passage to Cedar City.

As the emigrants began to leave, Lee and the militia butchered the men, women, and most of the children. Seventeen children who were too young to remember the attack were spared.

Did Brigham Young Approve the Attack?

Isaac Haight’s stake high council opposed the attack, and sent a messenger to Salt Lake City for Young’s advice on September 6. Young replied,

In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of. If those who are there will leave let them go in peace.

After a 500 mile round trip journey, militiamen received this response on Sept 13, two days too late to prevent the massacre.

The Aftermath

Historian D. Michael Quinn succinctly describes Young’s actions shortly after the massacre:

Apostle Wilford Woodruff, the official church historian, recorded that when Young first visited the mass burial site, he said that the memorial plaque should read: “Vengeance is mine and I have taken a little.”
Five days later the church president spoke to a congregation filled with many of the participants in the massacre. “Pres. Young said that the company that was used up at Mountain Meadows were the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and connections of those that murdered the prophets; they merited their fate, and the only thing that ever troubled him was the lives of the women and children, but that under the circumstances this could not be avoided.

Young discouraged Mormons from cooperating with federal investigations into the massacre, propagating instead the theory that rogue Indians were solely responsible, an explanation that virtually nobody found credible.

In 1870, church leaders quietly excommunicated Isaac Haight, John D. Lee, and militia leader George Wood. A final investigation ultimately resulted in Lee’s execution in 1877, and other conspirators successfully going into hiding. Why Lee was selected as scapegoat remains unclear.

Verdict

Brigham Young neither ordered nor approved of the Mountain Meadows Massacre beforehand, but his unwillingness to cooperate with federal officials precipitated the crisis, and his subsequent actions and rhetoric inflamed tensions rather than calming them. Young unambiguously condoned the attack afterwards.