The Original September 11 Tragedy:
An American Religious Massacre
If you were to ask the average American today, “What was the religion of the extremists who killed innocent people on 9/11?” they would immediately answer, “They were Muslims.” But if you were to ask the average American a century ago, “What was the religion of the extremists who killed innocent people on 9/11?” they would immediately answer, “They were Mormons.”
Before the awful 9/11 attacks in 2001, the worst religiously inspired mass murder in American history took place in 1857, when 128 innocent Americans were ruthlessly slaughtered. And that tragedy, like the more recent one, was also perpetrated by religious extremists, and eerily, that massacre also occurred on a September 11. The religious extremists in 1857, however, were not Muslims but Mormons, and the massacre on that long-ago September 11 took place not on the east coast of America, but on the far reaches of the western frontier.
Known as the “Mountain Meadows massacre,” this well-organized and religiously motivated ambush of a wagon train of settlers headed for the California territory remains a dark shadow on American history and a contemporary example of the extent to which the Mormon church continues to hide its true beginnings. Sally Denton, herself a descendant of Mormon pioneers, has meticulously detailed the complicated background of this almost forgotten American genocide in American Massacre (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
Denton spends several chapters explaining how the militaristic practices and political ambitions of Joseph Smith in Ohio, and later the autocratic rule of Brigham Young in Utah, created a climate that led to the atrocities at Mountain Meadows. The chapter describing the actual massacre vividly pictures the bravery and the suffering of the settlers during the five-day siege; the treachery of the Mormons in deceiving the Arkansans, with elaborate promises of safe passage, into surrendering their weapons; and a painfully detailed account of the vicious manner in which the defenseless prisoners, including women and young children, were then slaughtered. In another disturbing passage Denton describes how the murderers looted the corpses, with much of the plunder ending up in the Temple treasury in Salt Lake City, and how the Mormons then even divided up the surviving children, as well. And, in an act of outrageous shamelessness, some of the participants in the massacre and subsequent cover-up later submitted false claims to the United States government for reimbursement for their “expenses”!
Arkansas readers will find numerous local connections: nearly all of the doomed settlers were from Marion, Crawford, Carroll, and Johnson counties. A monument to the victims stands on the northeast lawn of the Boone County courthouse in Harrison, Arkansas. Of the small children who were spared, one-year-old Sarah Dunlap, blinded by an untreated infection and maimed by a musket ball, eventually made her way back to Calhoun County. James Lynch, the army officer who brought the surviving children back from Utah in 1859, never forgot the memory of that little girl and, in 1893, located her in Calhoun County. An unlikely romance ensued between James and Sarah, now thirty-eight years old, and they spent eight happy years together before her death. Both are buried in the Hampton city cemetery.
One particularly grisly but revealing footnote occurred on August 3, 1999. Descendants of the massacre’s victims have long pressured the Mormon church, which controls the Mountain Meadows land, to allow a monument on the site, which had fallen into disrepair, to be renovated. The church finally agreed and a backhoe was quietly dispatched to the meadow to begin preparation. To the dismay of church officials, the backhoe almost immediately unearthed more than thirty pounds of human skeletal remains. The dreadful discovery was promptly reported to church authorities in Salt Lake City. Although an initial forensic study of the remains had begun, as required by law, Utah Governor Mike Leavitt, himself a direct descendant of one of the massacre perpetrators, quickly ordered the remains re-interred over the strenuous objections of federal authorities.
In response Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, on behalf of the victim’s descendants living in the state, requested federal stewardship of the site, which would remove it from church control. Scott Fancher, a descendant of one of the wagon train’s leaders, said at the time, “It’s like having Lee Harvey Oswald in charge of JFK’s tomb.”
VIOLENT FAITH
When a stunned nation first heard the news reports that 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart had been kidnapped from her home in the middle of the night, there were a few individuals in Utah who immediately guessed the truth: that she had been abducted by a fundamentalist Mormon seeking another wife. These individuals were not acquainted with the perpetrator of the crime, a one-time worker in the Temple at Salt Lake City: Instead, they instinctively deduced what had happened because they themselves had been forced to become child-brides in a pervasive polygamous Mormon subculture that continues to exist in the United States today.
In the book Under The Banner of Heaven (Doubleday, 2003), author Jon Krakauer exposes the sordid story behind, and far-reaching consequences of, two of the most sacred principles in the founding of the Latter Day Saints: the doctrine of “blood atonement” and the practice of plural marriage.
He explains how Joseph Smith, the prophet and founder of Mormonism, threatened with the public exposure of his numerous lascivious liaisons involving both married and unmarried women and girls as young as 14, conveniently produced a self-serving “revelation” promulgating “spiritual wifery.” The second principle, the doctrine of blood atonement, authorized Mormons, and especially the “Danites,” the secret society of assassins organized and controlled by Smith, to exact vengeance on the enemies of the Latter Day Saints by spilling their blood on the ground in order to “save” them.
Krakauer documents how the doctrine of blood atonement found awful expression repeatedly over the years, including the massacre at Mountain Meadows. And the author illustrates how Joseph Smith’s practice and promotion of polygamy continues to bedevil the LDS church today, legitimizing an oppressive subculture which fosters incest, forced child marriages, and domestic violence; inspiring the creation of numerous fundamentalist sects; and forcing the mainstream Mormon church, anxious to project a wholesome, all-American public image, to strenuously attempt to hide its own history.
The far-reaching consequences of both of these doctrines found horrifying expression in 1985 in the brutal murder of a young Mormon wife and her eighteen-month-old daughter by her own fundamentalist brother-in-law. Readers should be forewarned that Krakauer’s narrative includes disturbing details of this ghastly crime, and that the author occasionally betrays a personal bias against all religions. However, he ultimately raises useful and necessary questions, not only about the specific abuses of Mormonism, but about the circumstances under which violence can come to be committed in the name of God.
-Dan Williams