Review: Richard E. Turley Jr., Janiece J. Johnson, and LuJean Purcell Carruth, eds. Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

Authors

Nathan B. Oman

Keywords

mountain meadows, massacre, John D. Lee, legal history, Brigham Young

Abstract

The story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is much told, most recently in the comprehensive account produced by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, and Glen M. Leonard under the auspices of the Church Historical Department.1 Massacre at Mountain Meadows, however, ends with the mass murder of immigrants by Mormon militiamen in 1857. The authors’ original plan was to produce a second volume that would extend the story to include the subsequent efforts by Mormons to deflect responsibility for the massacre and the pursuit of the perpetrators by federal officials (pp. xi–xii). Much of the research for this effort was completed, but the book itself has not yet been published. In Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers, however, we have been given the fruits of this research in the form of a superbly edited collection of documents related to the legal aftermath of the massacre. Understandably, the central question in the long and tortured story of efforts to bring the massacre’s perpetrators to justice revolve around questions of guilt. Was John D. Lee, the only man ever tried for the massacre, a villain, a scapegoat, or both? Most controversially, what was the role of Brigham Young?2 The documents in Collected Legal Papers will no doubt provide grist for these debates in the years to come. For example, they provide transcripts of previously unavailable documents written in nineteenth-century shorthand and reveal that the standard sources for Lee’s trial relied on by previous scholars belie the more detailed and at times contradictory contemporaneous transcripts (pp. 717–38).3 Beyond their immediate interest for scholars and students of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, these documents also tell a different story: They document the increasing legalization of the conflict between Mormons and the nation as the nineteenth century progressed. The Mormon embrace of the secular legal system in the 1870s was to have profound implications for later Latter-day Saint history, and Collected Legal Papers shows not only the mechanics of that process but also the way in which the aftermath of the bloody atrocity at Mountain Meadows drove much of it.

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Oman, Nathan B. (2019) "Review: Richard E. Turley Jr., Janiece J. Johnson, and LuJean Purcell Carruth, eds. Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 6: No. 1, Article 22.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol6/iss1/22