"Vengeance is Mine" by Richard E. Turley, Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown

Above: "Vengeance is Mine - The Mountain Meadows Massacre and its Aftermath." Richard E. Turley, Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown - 405 pages. I completed reading the above book today.

Whatever the level of stress that arises to challenge a community, the example of the Mountain Meadows Massacre highlights the need for all citizens to be able to think critically... to hold fast, even if it requires challenging authority, to timeworn moral principles during times when the social contract is taxed.

This book is a sequel to Richard E. Turley's book, published in 2008, "Massacre at Mountain Meadows," which chronicled the story of how southwestern Utah, LDS settlers slaughtered more than one hundred members of a California-bound wagon train in 1857. This book, co-authored by Barbara Jones Brown, reviews the aftermath of the massacre.

I did not read the 2008 Turley book, but I have read Juanita Brooks' "Mountain Meadows Massacre," and Will Bagley's "Blood of the Prophets," so I am reasonably familiar with the "event." I have also visited several times the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Washington County, Utah. At various locations at the site are informative story boards and monuments. Interestingly, an Arkansas State Flag flies over the stone cairn monument at the site of the Fancher train redoubt during the siege preceding the massacre.

The book's narrative of the massacre's aftermath extends from 11 September 1857, the date that the massacre took place to 23 March 1877, the date that John D. Lee, the only man convicted for perpetrating the massacre, was executed. The book could easily be retitled as "A Twenty-Year History of Utah Territory - 1857 to 1877."

The Mormon Southern Utah perpetrators of the massacre originally denied any involvement in the Mountain Meadow's Massacre, blaming the horrific event on the Paiute Indians. Harmony, Utah resident John D. Lee, deputized by local militia leaders to "monitor" the Indian attack on the Fancher Wagon Train, was sent three days after the massacre occurred by local militia leaders to brief Brigham Young on what had transpired. Lee, speaking to Brigham Young, denied any Mormon involvement.

But the truth about LDS settler involvement in such a gruesome event could not be kept a secret for long. 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.
"Vengeance Is Mine" chronicles southern Utah leaders’ efforts to cover up their crime by silencing witnesses and spreading lies. Investigations by both US governmental and church bodies were stymied by stonewalling and political wrangling. In the vast, empty, mid nineteenth century Great Basin territory it was relatively easy for a massacre perpetrator, aided by sympathetic fellow Mormons, to find a hiding place to escape being apprehended. While nine men were eventually indicted, five were captured and only one, John D. Lee was executed.

The book covers in detail the machinations of the defense and prosecution in Lee’s two trials, the second trial ending in Lee’s conviction. Turley and Brown explore the distressed relationships between Lee, church president Brigham Young, and a myriad of US federal authorities assigned to Utah territory, and assess what role, if any, Young may played in the cover-up, or even the authorization for the massacre itself. 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 lay 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. At the time of the massacre, the lives of all of the children under the age of seven were spared. It was deemed by the perpetrators that the children would be too young to remember the massacre therefore being of no threat to revealing the truth about horrific event they experienced.

Personal Musings on the Mountain Meadows Massacre

...after having visited the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre a dozen times and after having read three books on the topic.
Consider the tenor of the times in 1850's Utah Territory. Mormons in southern Utah were isolated, three hundred miles away from their leaders at Church Headquarters in Salt Lake City, only ten years from first arriving in Utah after having experienced persecution in Illinois, Missouri and Ohio. Southern Utah Mormons were on a war footing, steeped in fear of being routed by federal troops on their way to affirm US government primacy in Utah Territory.

In a climate of war imminence as conveyed by their Salt Lake City based leaders, but absent clear day to day direction from those same leaders (leaders were three hundred miles away), the southern Utah LDS settlers conflated the Fancher wagon train's presence in "their territory" with the enemy, the US government. It did not help that Fancher train members, angry that the Mormon settlers would not trade with them, likely let words fly. One can observe, if not excuse, how ordinary, otherwise decent, people in such perceived existential crisis might lose their moral moorings. Harvard psychologist Robert M. Yerkes' "The Dancing Mouse" experiments in 1907 concluded that overloaded brains become dysfunctional. Methinks brain dysfunctionality more than unadulterated malevolence was, if not an underlying cause of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a contributing factor.

Whatever the level of stress that arises to challenge a community, the example of the Mountain Meadows Massacre highlights the need for citizens to be able to think critically... to hold fast, even if it requires pushing back against authority, to timeworn moral principles when the social contract is taxed.

Consider the recent coronavirus scandal where a majority of Americans willingly, unthinkingly complied, with the government's ill-conceived directives, proscriptions and mandates. The coronavirus scandal was induced by direct, explicit governmental directive whereas the Mormon settlers in southwestern Utah reacted in a vacuum of explicit direction from their Church leaders but within the framework of Church warnings about the threats outsiders might present to their safety. In both cases, however, people suspended critical thinking and cast aside timeworn moral principles. In both cases, innocent lives were ruined and lost when critical thinking was suspended.

Today we are no more insulated from the impetus to do evil than Utah settlers were during the Utah War period, or all as all Americans were during the recent Covid period. Coming are more challenges to abandon public order at the behest of misplaced absolutism. Under such circumstances we must be prepared to do the right thing. I admit, easy to say, hard to do... but still a word to the wise.

Pinto Aside

Eight miles by dirt road from the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is the tiny, isolated settlement of Pinto. Today, nestled within dryish, rugged, pygmy forest clad hills, Pinto is an unincorporated grassy valley, with a dozen or so visible homes, bisected by a small stream. Mormon pioneers colonized the area in 1856. Pinto is still actively ranched today.

Pinto cannot escape its brush with a sordid historical event which occurred from 7 to 11 September 1857, only a year after settlers first moved to Pinto.

My interest in Pinto derives from reading "Vengeance is Mine, The Mountain Meadows Massacre and its Aftermath " the book being reviewed here. I met co-author Turley, former LDS Church Assistant Historian and previous LDS Church Public Affairs Head, at a bibliophile event at Salt Lake City's Alta Club two weeks ago and learned of his and Brown's new publication. The next day I ordered the Turley/Brown book from Amazon.com. In my reading of "Vengeance is Mine," I found references to Pinto, less than twenty miles away from our Ivins, UT home, in the narrative. I had visited the actual massacre site several times but considering my inveterate curiosity about obscure Utah historical locations and my general interest in The Mountain Meadows Massacre, in early June 2023, TIMDT, Freddie, and I, back country maps in hand, set out in the Sprinter to find the obscure locale community of Pinto.

Above: Pinto Utah Images. June 2023.

Here are the "Pinto" quotes from the book that piqued my interest:

Amos Thornton from nearby Pinto helped bury the dead but 'wished he had not,' recounted his stepson, 'as the memory of that terrible sight he could not forget.'

Sometime before March (1862), a group of Union Army volunteers at San Bernardino took into custody two Utah men, one from Santa Clara and one from Pinto, where the traveling duo tried to sell the soldiers butter and cheese. Four days later, the two learned the reason for the arrest when James H. Carleton, now a colonel and the army volunteers' leader, was finally able to cross the engorged Santa Ana to reach the camp. "Who pulled down the monument at Mountain Meadows?' Carlton interrogated the prisoners. One of them answered "he didn't think it was anybody" in southern Utah because people already "had too much work of their own to do, and [even] if they hadn't, they did not like work well enough to do that." "I guess that brother Brigham and John D. Lee, Isaac C. Haight, John M. Higbee and Prime Coleman had a hand in it," Carleton shot back. We are coming to learn them to leave dead folks' bones alone."

The above book excerpts describe situations peripheral to the actual massacre. I'm aware of no actual massacre perpetrator who was a Pinto resident.