Welcome and Introduction to the Book Club

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I am one of your hosts for today, John Dehlin. It is today's Mormon Stories podcast Book Club edition. Today we are here to discuss a really important book that's come out this year. Ish. The book is called Vengeance is the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath. The two authors are Richard E. Turley Jr. Former historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or the LDS Church, and Barbara Jones Brown, who is here in studio with us. Hey, Barbara. Hey. Thanks for joining us.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:00:37] Thank you so much for inviting me. It's exciting to be here.

John Dehlin [00:00:40] Yeah. And for those of you who have been following Mormon Stories this year, this is Barbara's, I don't know, second or third time to be on Mormon Stories at least. Yeah. Second time she's been on talking about Sandra Tanner and she also was on recently with Sarah Patterson to talk about the September 6th. But Barbara Jones Brown is not just a historian of a really important book, but also she runs Signature books, which is in my mind, one of the most important bookmakers in all of Mormon history. How's that? Is that too much? Did I go over the topic?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:01:10] I take it? Thank you, John.

Rebecca [00:01:12] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:01:13] I'm also super excited to have co hosting on Mormon Stories Book Club as we always do, the Rebecca Biblioteca. Hey, Rebecca.

Rebecca [00:01:21] Hey, John. Hey, Barbara. How are you guys today?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:01:23] Good, how are you?

Rebecca [00:01:24] Great, great. Super excited to be here in stud for the first time for an entire year. So this is great.

John Dehlin [00:01:30] Yeah. And Rebecca is the reason why we have a Mormon Stories book club. Let me go ahead and give the time over to her. I do wanna welcome our live streaming audience. We're grateful for you. We're always grateful for your chats and your super chats and your donations. But I also wanna just thank the base Mormon Stories donor audience who make all this possible. So thanks to everyone who donates to Mormon Stories Podcast. You can do that@mormonstories.org, become a monthly and we'll be able to keep creating content like this. But Rebecca has some news items that we're gonna have her begin with because she is in charge of this book club thing.

Rebecca [00:02:09] Well, there we go.

John Dehlin [00:02:10] And also feel free to plug your own stuff.

Rebecca [00:02:12] Ah, there we go. Yeah. Book club business always at the top of the hour. Right? So as John said, today we are going to be discussing Vengeance is Mine. We have the amazing Barbara Jones Brown in our studio today. Usually we introduce the next book that's coming up in the current episode that we're doing. We have a couple books in the works. This won't be until January, so we're looking at the book a reckoning by McKay Coppins as a possible book, which would be absolutely amazing.

John Dehlin [00:02:41] Maybe Barbara can help us get McKay Coppins on one of the stories.

Rebecca [00:02:44] I feel like maybe Barbara could. Or maybe right now we'll just put a plea out to McKay. We would love to have you on. This would be incredible.

John Dehlin [00:02:50] So all viewers listen to bother, bugs, annoy, harass, stalk McKay Coppins until he responds to our emails.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:02:57] My husband is a journalist and knows McKay, so awesome.

John Dehlin [00:03:00] All right.

Rebecca [00:03:01] Okay, there it is. Yeah, I've reached out a couple times, but who am I? Right?

John Dehlin [00:03:05] So he's been on Mormon stories before.

Rebecca [00:03:07] Yeah, I think probably we'll get.

John Dehlin [00:03:08] But that's cool. That Romney book has really taken the nation by storm. Yeah. And I'm kind of proud of Mitt Romney and what he's done.

Rebecca [00:03:14] No, I think that's perfectly suited for the Mormon Stories book club. So we hopefully have that on your radar, everybody. We will hopefully be having McKay on maybe January, February, or whenever he's able to come on. Also, how to Change minds by David McRavey. We're reaching out to him, too, which is a really good book. So these are two things. Look for announcements on these coming up in the next couple months. In the meantime, however, I did not want to leave you all book lists for Christmas and the holidays, so I'm just going to make a recommendation of a book. This is a book that we've read in my book club, the other one that I run, the Good Book Club. And this book is called For Small Creatures, Such as Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. And this is written by Sasha Sagan. She is the daughter of Carl Sagan, if you're familiar with who that is. The uber astronomer scientist of the 70s and 80s who had many different books and television shows. This book is important, especially for post or nuanced Mormons during the holiday season, because it talks about when you lose your rituals if you step away from your religion or your ideology. And what do you replace it with? That's a question that a lot of people ask, how do I celebrate this now? How do I mark this event? She talks about secular rituals that you can develop that are very personalized for you and your family. And it's just an absolutely beautiful book. So if you're looking for something to read to help you in the holidays, just to find out how to make them more meaningful in perhaps a more Secular way, if that's where you are right now, cannot recommend this book enough. And it's possible that we'll be reaching out to Sasha and having her on the Mormon Stories Book Club because she's a wonderful person too. So everybody grab this book for small creatures Such as we Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. It's a quick read, but I guarantee it will sort of change your life. It's pretty amazing. So that's all I have right now. John, let's it do Dive in with Barbara.

John Dehlin [00:05:00] Perfect. And I'm just going to start by saying, everyone please open up a tab in your browser right now or pause your podcast, pull over on the side of the road or stop mowing your lawn. Go to Amazon or signature book or Benchmark books or wherever you can buy a book and buy this book. We want to encourage and promote and support Mormon history, Mormon scholarship, Mormon studies, and this book is as worthy as a book is. I've loved it. It's so please go buy it and buy it for It's a great Christmas gift, don't you think, Barbara?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:05:36] Well, it's a little grim for Christmas, but it's always good to read. And I would also add that the audiobook version is excellent, if you prefer audiobooks. And there's also the Kindle version as well. But the actor that the press hired to read the book is excellent and he does all the voices. He even pronounces most of the Mormon terms correctly. He actually says Lamanites and Nephi instead of Nephi and Lemon, it seems like.

John Dehlin [00:06:03] That's awesome.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:06:04] Yeah, it's a great audiobook as well.

John Dehlin [00:06:06] Yeah. Okay, so it's time to dive in. We're going to kind of do 3ish parts to this episode. Part one is going to be kind of learning about Barbara's story and how she got interested in this topic. It's a really moving and meaningful part. It's also great to understand Barbara a little bit better. I want to have Barbara on to do a long form, but that won't be today. Maybe that'll be someday in the future. Part two will be just telling the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Believe it or not, we're 18 years into the History of Mormon Stories podcast and we've never told the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We did on a Mormon Matters obscure episode back when Mormon Matters podcast first started. But this is the first time on Mormon Stories. So Barbara, you get the I can't think of a better person to do that. And then we're going to end by having some Q and A. Rebecca's got some great questions, and we'll entertain questions from you, our live audio. But if we had to describe how severe or significant the Mountain Meadows Massacre was, I was gonna say one of the biggest massacres in the history of the United States, but that's probably not even close to true if you count Native American populations. So how is it described in terms of how significant it was in the history of US Massacres? Let's just say.

Overview and Significance of the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Barbara Jones Brown [00:07:25] Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought up the fact that there have been many Native American massacres, massacres of Native Americans that were larger in number, but and more in number. So it's always important to recognize that there's not just one massacre in our history. In terms of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, it is significant in that it was committed by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a religious group, and they wiped out a wagon train of immigrants headed for California. And so for the church history and for Utah history is very significant for that reason.

John Dehlin [00:08:01] Yeah. And. Yeah. And the numbers are quite large.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:08:07] Yes. Some 100 innocent people, men, women and children were slaughtered.

John Dehlin [00:08:11] Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to be talking about that, but before we do, let's start with your story. Barbara, tell us a little bit about yourself, your kind of whatever you want to share about your life before Mountain Meadows.

Barbara Jones Brown's Background and Research

Barbara Jones Brown [00:08:25] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:08:25] And then how you got into it.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:08:26] Sure. So the first time I heard about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, I was 22 years old, recently returned from an LDS mission to Japan. I was a BYU graduate, LDS High School seminary graduate, and had never heard of it. But my father was really into Mormon history as a hobby, and Mormon and Americana and so forth. So he collected all kinds of artifacts and books and things like that. So we had all kinds of historical paintings and prints and things hanging around our house. And so there was one I had always seen, and it's a depiction of this mountainous valley. It's an 1877 lithograph, and there's a wagon train kind of rolling into the valley. And so I'd never paid much attention to it until one day I was sitting in our family room and got up out of an easy chair in the family room and looked closely at this print that was hanging behind that easy chair. And I started looking, and for the first time I noticed in the lower right hand corner, very racialized depictions of Native Americans hiding in rocks. And they had clubs and knives in between their teeth, and they're kind of menacingly looking at this wagon train. And then at the bottom of this 1877 print, it said Mountain Meadows. And I said, dad, what's the Mountain Meadows? And he says, well, it's a group of Mormon militiamen and group of Indians reportedly wiped out a wagon train of people headed for California in southwest Utah in 1857. And I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. Like many of your listeners, I had grown up just only hearing wonderful stories about my church's history and about my family history, including in 1856, how one of my ancestors had been one of the rescuers that went out to save a wagon train and handcart companies who were stranded on the plains went out to rescue them, save their lives. Heroic stories like that. And I thought, how? How did the same people who rescued people in 1856, not the exact same people, but this Latter Day Saints the following year, wipe out an innocent wagon company? How on earth could that happen? So I asked my dad why? And he said, we just don't know a lot about it. He said, supposedly these people who were killed were bragging that they had the gun that killed Joseph Smith and had poisoned a spring as they're heading through Utah. And my reaction was, so how does that justify this? And he said, honey, we just really don't know that much about it. I didn't know at that time that a historian named Juanita Brooks had published a book called the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1950. So I didn't read anything about it at that time, but I kind of put on my back burner and I was just, someday I wanted to know how something like that could happen.

John Dehlin [00:11:44] Is it worth mentioning, just really briefly how important of a figure and heroic and inspirational of a figure Juanita Brooks was, Or if you want to say that later, but I consider her top 10.

Juanita Brooks and the Scholarly Legacy

Barbara Jones Brown [00:11:56] No, let's talk about Juanita Brooks. In fact, if you look at Vengeance is Mine on the dedication page, we dedicate our book to Juanita Brooks because she was the first who against all odds had the courage to tell the story of her community's grim and covered up secret.

John Dehlin [00:12:13] And she was faithful, right?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:12:14] Yes, she was.

John Dehlin [00:12:15] And also she was like, I have pictures of her like ironing the clothes as like a stay at home mom and then writing the book almost at night, pre Internet, pre women working outside the home.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:12:29] So I met Juanita Brooks's sons and they, you know, I just asked them what was it like to grow up with Juanita as your mom? And they said, well, what she would do is back in the 30s and 40s, when she's doing her scholarly work, it wasn't so popular for a housewife at the time to be doing scholarly research. And so what she would do is she would have a pile of ironing on her ironing board and an iron. And if anyone came over to visit her, she didn't want to be bothered with long visits. And so she would say, oh, I've got so much ironing I need to do. Good to see you. And then as soon as the visitor would leave, she'd sit back at her typewriter and go back to her scholarly work. So it wasn't just the Mountain Meadows Massacre that she wrote about. She wrote several books and spent her life doing historical research and writing.

John Dehlin [00:13:21] And she faced a little bit of threats of disciplinary church discipline. Correct.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:13:25] She definitely was ostracized by her community. It was looked down upon to bring forth this secret that they just felt like, look, let's let bygones be bygones, not talk about this anymore. And how dare you? Why are you bringing this to the surface? We don't want to talk about this. And again, she published this in 1950. So it was a different time.

John Dehlin [00:13:46] And five years after Juanita. I mean, after Joanna.

Rebecca [00:13:49] Yeah, sure.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:13:49] After Fran Brody published no Man Knows My History, which I believe was 1946. And they were friends and contemporaries, Juanita and Fran, back to your story. Okay, so, yeah. So make a long story short. Juanita Brooks is my heroine. I don't agree with all of her findings in her book because we've done so much more research since then, but she will always be my heroine and she was my inspiration. Just her courage in telling the story. I've always wanted to be like Juanita, and that's why we dedicate our book to her and we actually. The book ends with her as well. Beautiful. So back to my story. So as I was saying. So in the early 90s, I first heard about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, determined someday I want to learn about this and try to grasp how this could happen. I went on to become a professional editor and worked in editing professionally for 20 plus years. I was an editor for the New Era magazine and for the Ensign magazines for the LDS Church. And when I started to have kids, I decided to just start working from home and do freelance work. And so by then, I was starting to get interested in history and in Mormon history. And so I turned in a resume to Elder Marlon K. Jensen of the Church History department. At the time, he was church historian, and he and my dad were roommates at byu. So I had a personal relationship with him. So I left him a resume, said, hey, if the church history department ever needs some freelance editing, I'd be interested. Didn't hear anything for months. And several months later I got a call from Rick Turley and he said, I'd like you to come in and interview for a full time position doing editing work. And I said, ah, I had just found out we were expecting our second daughter and we had a little three year old. So I was like, I don't know if I'm. I'm ready for full time work at this time. And I said, what would you want me to do? And he said, I want you to edit my book on the Mountain Meadows massacre. And I said, I'll be right there. So went in, had an interview with him, and it was just one of those experiences, you know, some of us have where we just feel like, I'm supposed to do this, this doesn't make any sense, but I'm supposed to do this. So I. So I accepted his offer and began working full time on the book.

John Dehlin [00:16:24] And that's not this book, that's predecessor, its predecessor.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:16:28] Right. So Vengeance Is Mine is actually second in a sequel in, in a series. So the first book was called Massacre at Mountain Meadows. So I started editing that. And as any good editor will do, I started digging into the primary sources and reading every primary source I could get my hands on so that I could be familiar with this subject. And what I was learning was horrific. And I might become emotional. I was really grateful I had an office with a door that I could close because I often found myself weeping at my desk as I was reading firsthand accounts of this horrific atrocity I was experiencing. And others on the staff as well working on the subject. We were experiencing ptsd, like symptoms. I was having nightmares. Sometimes I would break down crying uncontrollably or like find myself zoning off and finding myself picturing the Mountain Meadows. Lots of anxiety and so forth. But I was committed to studying this and making sure all of these horrific details were in the book because I never wanted to hear anyone ever say, oh well, those people deserved it, or those people were asking for it. I wanted readers to know how horrific it is it was, so they can only condemn it. What happened, Let me think. So during this time I would. I often felt compelled also to meet descendants of victims of the purpose of the crime, victims of. Of the massacre. 17 very young children were spared the slaughter. And we can talk about that when we get into the story, but descendants of those 17 children, as well as children of victims who didn't. Who weren't in the Wagon train. And I would go down to Rick's office and I would say, I just. I really feel compelled to meet descendants of victims. And I'd say that several times. And then once he said, well, the direct descendant of Alexander Fancher and the direct descendant of John Twitty Baker, two of the leaders of the train, they're coming up to meet with Elder Jensen next week. You can say hi to them after that meeting. So they met with Elder Jensen. I'm not sure what about to this day, but I was waiting outside his office, and as soon as they stepped outside, I grabbed their hands and I said, I want you to know your ancestors were good people. They did not deserve what happened to them, and I am so sorry. And I was stunned at their reaction. They just immediately started crying, which made me start crying, and then they grabbed me, and we were standing there by the elevators, hugging in the hallway. Make a long story short, they invited me out to Arkansas for a reenactment or a reunion of all of the descendants of the wagon train members gathering at Bellar Spring, Arkansas, where they had left in April 1857. So this was in April 2007. I went out, met all these folks, and when they met me, they'd say, okay, well, who do you descend from? And I said, well, no, and I'm just a Mormon from Utah. And people's eyes would get really big. They were surprised I was there, wondering what on earth I was doing there. I became friends with all these folks eventually, and later they told me that it was spreading through this reunion. There's a Mormon spy from Utah over there. Don't talk to her. We laugh about that now. But I listened to their anger. A lot of them were very, very angry and very hurt and upset. But because I was studying this subject and I was angry about it, I was hurt, I was upset. I was able to sit with their anger and just listen. Because I didn't identify with the Mormon militiamen who carried out the massacre. I identified with the immigrant women, the mothers of young children who were just trying to protect their children, were not unable to, sort of. I just listened to their anger. And some of them invited me over to their house that night for dinner. We all sat and talked. We talked about things that needed to change. And I just said, what? What can we do for you? What can I do for you as descendants of victims? And there were two things that they wanted they wanted the story told, they wanted the truth about their ancestors told. And they wanted their ancestors to never be forgotten. And then they wanted the Mountain Meadows, the valley in southwestern Utah where the remains of their ancestors are buried. They wanted that land protected in perpetuity to make sure, you know, development didn't happen, to make sure there wasn't vandalism, to make sure it was just protected and honored and respected. So I go back to Utah and start talking with Elder Jensen and Rick Turley and just sharing experiences. To make a long story short, we had a series of exchanges. We would fly back to Arkansas and meet folks. They would fly to Salt Lake City and talk with us. In 2007, there was 150th commemoration at the Mountain Meadows. Just lots of exchanges and a lot of us just saying we're sorry and just owning what had happened and trying to do everything that we could to preserve their ancestors memory. Eventually all of the descendants groups led by the Mountain Meadows Monument foundation, they proposed that we seek National Historic landmark status for the Mountain Meadows. So we did that. Worked together. We all went to Washington D.C. to argue for this proposal before the committee. It was approved right there. We all went at the hallways, we're hugging and just celebrating that this was accomplished. So to make a long story short, I was finally healed. I didn't know this would heal me, but I was healed from those PTSD like symptoms. When I started reaching out to descendants of victims and just telling them I was sorry, I think because I realized there was something I could do for the victims. I couldn't get in a time machine and change what had happened, but what I could do for those victims was to reach out to their descendants and and again preserve their memory. So that's why the books, that's why I speak about Mountain Meadows to anyone who invites me everywhere I can and I will always be telling this story and seeking reconciliation and healing. And then just a final chapter on this after all of these reconciliation efforts. After we book one was published in 2008, after we achieved National Historic Landmark status several years into co authoring with Rick Turley, Vengeance is Mine. I was looking at my family history and I saw a name there that I recognized because it appeared it was an unusual name. It was the last name of Holly H A W L E Y I looked in the index of Massacre at Mount Meadows. It directed me to an appendix of the militiamen who participated and I saw my ancestor's name there. So I discovered after all of this, I was a descendant of a perpetrator of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, like my hero in Juanita Brooks.

Meeting Descendants and the LDS Statement of Regret

John Dehlin [00:24:27] So what did that mean for you?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:24:30] It was surreal. Not only just to. And Rebecca has had a similar experience. I'm sure we'll talk about that. It was surreal to discover that I had an ancestor involved in something so heinous. But the added layer on top of that was that I had felt so compelled a to take this job, so compelled to meet descendants of victims, not knowing why, and that I. That I just happened to fall into this. So that was surreal. And so I think I'm glad now to know that because I have a lot of people reach out to me after reading our books who also have discovered they're a descendant of a perpetrator or have always known they're a descendant of a perpetrator. And I can reach out to them and say, you know, I know how that feels. I know what that's like. And they say, what do we do? How do I deal with this? And I'll just encourage them. Reach out and say you're sorry. That's all we can do. You know, it's. Just own it and say sorry. So. Oh, and then I forgot to add, too. After the first book came out, I loved the historical research so much, I decided I didn't want to just edit historians. I wanted to be a historian. So I went back to graduate school and got a master's degree in American history from the University of Utah. And then after that, I started. Well, while I was doing that, I was co authoring this book with Rick Turley.

John Dehlin [00:25:53] Beautiful. Rebecca, I'm curious if you have anything you want to ask or say, but I do want to just quickly ask one question.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:26:00] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:26:01] I hope I didn't miss this, but there was something around, I believe, Elder Eyring or President Eyring and some sort of apology or. I don't know if it's right to call it an apology, but there's this perception that the church doesn't apologize, but some maybe perceive that an apology sort of happened. Is there anything worth saying about that?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:26:23] Yeah. I was there in 2007 when Elder Eyring, he was not a member of the first presidency yet, but Elder Eyring was there, and he read the Statement of Regret for me sitting in the audience, and he was crying as he read it for me sitting in the audience. I felt like this is an apology. I do also acknowledge, though, the viewpoint. Some people feel like it didn't go far enough. I recognize that viewpoint. Afterwards, the media ran up and was asking Rick Turley, who was also there, was that an apology? And Rick said it was meant as an apology. The church is very sorry that this happened. And what I think, though, also is actions speak louder than words. And I have seen the church do all that it can to acquire additional land at the Mountain Meadows, spending a lot of money to acquire additional lands and then add that to the National Historic Landmark designation to make sure that this land is protected always. And also working with descendants groups, having descendants write texts for monuments that have been added there, working with the descendants to say, what more can we do to preserve the meadows? To me, actions speak louder than words. And those actions certainly have been apologetic and wanting to do the right thing by these people.

John Dehlin [00:27:52] That's great. Rebecca, anything you want to ask or Carmina?

Rebecca [00:27:56] Yeah, I think I would say that Barbara and I have really bonded on this whole issue. My story, I'll tell it extremely quickly because I know we need to get to the big story. But when I was working at the BYU library, hence running book clubs, probably late 20s, I was doing a reclassification project of old Mormon books. And as you're looking through to catalog them, you look in the index, and I found my founding Mormon ancestor's name there. And so excitedly I looked into the book.

John Dehlin [00:28:23] What's his name?

Rebecca [00:28:24] Or can you say Ira Allen? Probably a lot of. Maybe some of your viewers are related. I've run across people. Anyway, he was my founding ancestor. And to this point, I had only heard amazing things about a pioneer, him heritage and a pioneer ancestor. And as I started to read through these books and look at his name and what he'd done, he was one of the militia. He was a lieutenant in the militia. He was on the high council that made the decision to put these plans in action. So that changed everything for me. It's hard to explain how I felt, but it absolutely changed everything. No one in my family had ever told me this. I had never heard this from anyone. And so I, of course, being a little researcher myself, I made a lot of copies of things and it information. And I took it to a family reunion and I was basically told, no, we don't want to know about that. That's not our narrative for our ancestor. And so I had to kind of wrestle with it alone for a long time and try to figure out how my ancestor, who was a nice, normal person, I assume, walking around in Connecticut in 1847, 10 years later, having joined the Mormon Church, suddenly was somebody that could commit such an atrocity. And so I did struggle with that for a while. And I was very interested in the 2007 push to research and find out what had happened. There was an Ensign article that came out. I actually have a copy of it right here. I didn't realize it was written by Richard Turley, but it was. And I wanted to see how the church. What was their explanation, you know, what had happened to my ancestor. I vacillated back and forth between being really angry at him and also then seeing him himself as a victim, and I wanted to know more. So the article, to me, I think it's a former narrative that your book almost puts to rest completely because it said this was the action of a rogue high council in Cedar City. You know, they just kind of decided to do this because of some things they believed about the wagon train. So at that point, I had to just kind of distance myself from the story because I thought, all right, the blame is on my ancestor. I don't really want to take this on or think about it anymore. But it's still always been in the background of different things, and I've done it and read different books. And I've also visited the Mountain Meadows site. I made little rocks where I wrote, I'm so sorry, great, great, great granddaughter of a perpetrator. And I left them around on the site. And I also ran into descendants of survivors. And there was one particular time, it was on the anniversary, and I'd taken a book club group there to the site, and they were also having. The survivors of descendants of Survivors were also having a meeting there, as they always do on the anniversary. And a woman came up to our group, and I was leading the group. She said, oh, are you. And I just broke down and I said, I'm sorry. I'm not family. I'm the other side. I'm the perpetrator. And like Barbara's experience, she hugged me. She said, it's okay. It's all right. We're gonna work through all of this, and we're gonna do what's best for the memory and to preserve the memory of these wonderful people. So, to me, that was very healing. There is a lot of healing because there's a lot of tragedy. So I just think it's important at this point that we dive into the story that Barbara can tell us, because I feel like a lot of your viewers and listeners may not really be aware. It's something that's not, as I found out from my family, not discussed. I mean, there is a lot of secrecy about it. And the important thing is to shine a light on of it and let's deal with it and let's have healing begin. So I think we just dive right in. Tell us what we need to know, Barbara. Sure.

John Dehlin [00:31:53] Masquerade an hour.

Rebecca [00:31:54] Go in an hour. Ready, Go.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:31:56] Well, first just let me say I 100% agree with with you, Rebecca and my co author Rick and I often say none of us alive today is responsible for the massacre, but we are all responsible for how we deal with it. And so if we seek to try and cover it up or justify or excuse it, that's not the right way to handle it. The right way is to, like you say, shine sunshine on it, make it so it's not a taboo topic, so it's safe to talk about now and then own it and apologize and then we can seek healing and resting us reconciliation and peace.

John Dehlin [00:32:29] Beautiful. So let's do it.

How the Massacre Was Planned and Carried Out

Barbara Jones Brown [00:32:31] Okay. So how could this thing happen?

John Dehlin [00:32:34] Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:32:35] Okay. So in 1857, a newly elected president named James Buchanan has heard rumors from Utah Territory where the Latter Day Saints have been living for 10 years. They started colonizing the territory in 1847. He hears rumors from federal officials, federal appointees who had been in Utah. They go back to Washington D.C. and they say, we've got a problem out in Utah. We have a growing theocracy. Brigham Young was not only the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, he was also the governor of Utah Territory and Superintendent of Indian affairs was the title. So we've got a growing theocracy in the West. They're practicing polygamy. They are forming alliances with Native Americans and apostates and gentiles are not safe in the territory. So Buchanan starts hearing these kinds of rumors and then at the same time, the Utah territorial legislature in January 1857, they're fed up with the federal appointees that are besides being sent to the territory. So territories at the time were like colonies. They did not have the right to elect their many of their officials or their judges. They were appointed in the east and sent out to these territories or basically colonies to rule. And so the Latter Day Saint legislature, which was all Latter Day Saints and they were locally elected, they send this scathing petition or memorial back to Washington D.C. saying, We're sick of the judges and the people you're sending here. We don't like them. And if they don't seek to identify with us, we will send them away

John Dehlin [00:34:23] for our never Mormons will you do 30 seconds on what made them the LDS folk particularly hostile towards the Federal government in terms of its history. Just real quick.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:34:34] Sure, absolutely. So in the 1830s and 1840s, the latter day Saints have been violently driven from Missouri and Illinois. That's why they came out to the Great Basin and what became Utah a few years later, because they were getting away from the United States. They were. They. They loved the Constitution, but they thought the United States had gone astray. And they were bitterly anti government, anti military, because militia units had been used to drive them out. And they had received no protection from the federal government in spite of their petitions. So they felt that they could get no peace, no protection, no right, but in the United States. So they head to the west in what was Mexico in the 1840s. But after the Mexican American War, it becomes part of the US and shortly thereafter, the territory of Utah is created.

John Dehlin [00:35:29] And I mean, the church's founder, Joseph Smith, was murdered. And the church felt, what about that?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:35:36] So Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were assassinated in 1844. And again, no one was convicted for that crime. And again, they just felt like the United States was not there to protect them. And the United States had killed their best men. So they were bitter as they left. So that's kind of their mindset coming from the Utah side of it. So with that background, when Brigham Young and other church leaders hear word that the newly elected president has sent an army to Utah to occupy their settlements, they freak out because of their prior experience. They also hear that Brigham Young is going to be replaced as a territorial governor. Young says, okay, the new federal appointees, they can come in, that's fine. We'll let them in. But the troops must not enter. And he says, I feel to be oppressed no more. They are not going to be driven from their homes again.

John Dehlin [00:36:30] So never again.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:36:31] Never again. And they weren't. They haven't been. So they developed strategies, resistance strategies against these approaching troops. And their plan is to try and get stalled the troops on the plane that year. And if they can get them stalled on the plains through the winter, Congress will meet. And then they hope that they to win public opinion and that Congress will say, look, why are you sending troops against our own people? And they're hoping that Congress will rein in the president and encourage Buchanan to pull the troops back. So that's exactly what they do. Many Latter Day Saints might know the famous stories of Lot Smith and the Mormon militia who opposed the troops on the plains. They burned grass in front of the approaching troops so that their animals would starve to death and not be Able to progress. They burned government supply trains, so on and so forth in what became known as the Utah War.

John Dehlin [00:37:28] We don't think of our pioneer ancestors like burning bush so that cattle will die and burning wagon trains. Right?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:37:36] Yeah, exactly. This is, I mean, some people hear of this, others that never hear about this. You know, we just think, oh, just a peace loving people. So yeah, but Brigham Young, again, he's telling these militiamen, don't kill anyone, just harass them and keep them stalled on the planes. And he says, and we quote him in this book, he says, we want to win public opinion abroad. We want to win over the rest of the country and Congress so that they'll convince the President to pull back the troops. But let's stall them on the plane so they can't come in. And then they will have to spend the winter. Back then there was so much snow and you're on horseback and in wagons. You can't progress into the settlements in that kind of snow. So that's exactly what happens. They get stalled near the burned out remains of Fort Bridger in what is today Wyoming. And they do spend the winter on the plains, which makes the troops super upset. They're growing in their anger against the Latter Day Saints. So that's what they're doing outside of the territory. Then within the territory, they're encouraging Mormons to prepare for a siege. They're saying, save your ammunition, save your guns, save your grain. Don't sell any grain or food to passing immigrants. We need to cash it and hoard it and prepare for a possible siege if the troops do make it in. And then there's another strategy that came out more strongly in volume two when we started looking at the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows massacre. Young and his advisors and his interpreters to Native American tribes who speak Native American languages. They start encouraging local tribes to raid immigrants, cattle companies to steal their cattle, run off their cattle. Okay, why? So another strategy that, that Young comes up with is, he says, okay, we've always by the Mormons being here in the Great Basin, through which all of the trails to the west coast pass. If, if we can convince the federal government that our staying here keeps these trails feel safe and open for immigration, then maybe they won't drive us. And if we can convince that sending troops here is instigates warlike hysteria, then maybe they'll pull the troops back because he says Indians. And again, he's playing on racial stereotypes that we don't agree with. But this is, this is what the stereotypes were at the time he's saying, all hell is going to break loose if war breaks out here, and if the Latter Day Saints, and if we're not holding the Indians back, they're going to start raiding all these cattle companies. And so he says, keep the troops out, and then we can go back to our peaceful ways before emigration can continue safely. But if you keep sending the troops, these raids are going to happen. So that's what he's saying publicly. Privately, he and his interpreters are encouraging local tribes to engage in raiding cattle companies. He also is trying to befriend and win the friendship of the local tribes in fighting against the troops, should they make it into the territory. So they are using them. So many of the local natives say, no, we're not going to engage in that. We'll just go up in the. We'll go up in the hills and let the two of you fight it out, and then we'll just make friends with the winner. And others are saying, but. But you've always told us not to steal, not to raid and take immigrant cattle. And the interpreter says, so I have. But now the Americans have come to fight us, and things are different right now. So this was a wartime strategy. So what we found is that between September 7 and October 3, 1857, there were several raids by Native Americans led by Mormon interpreters, white Mormon interpreters, that are carried out throughout the territory from what is now the border of Utah and Idaho all the way down to what is now Nevada. Several raids on several different wagon trains, and only one of them led to a massacre when something went awry.

John Dehlin [00:42:00] Okay, I only want you to talk about this in the sequence that you feel comfortable. One of our viewers, Brendan Lee, has asked if it's worth mentioning the Mormon Reformation.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:42:13] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [00:42:14] And its influence, but only at the point you think it makes sense.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:42:17] Let's talk about it now. So you have that going on. You have war, you have a conflict going on between Utah and the federal government. You have that going on. And then also in 1856 and 1857, in the church, you have something called the Mormon Reformation. So beginning in 1856, Brigham Young and other church leaders, primarily Jedediah M. Grant, who was an apostle, they feel that Latter Day Saints aren't as devout as they used to be. They're not as active in paying their tithing and as dedicated as they once were. And so these leaders feel like they need to preach some really strong sermon with some strong rhetoric, some of it very violent, to kind of like wake up the people to their duty. So that is going on, and it's violent rhetoric. So you have that. You have the war hysteria, and you have all of these things that come together at the same time. So thank you for bringing that up. And then one of the doctrines that's being preached at this time as part of the Mormon Reformation is blood atonement. And so many people have heard of blood atonement. Some haven't today, but it was a doctrine that Brigham Young and others taught that the atonement, the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, is not enough to atone for all sins, namely, very serious sins such as murder and repeated adultery. And so this doctrine said that if somebody committed one of those heinous sins, if they wanted to go to the highest degree of heaven or the celestial kingdom, and they had to also offer up their own blood, and that could absolve them of these serious crimes. So they could go to a church leader and say, I'm offering myself up, and then that person could be blood atoned. So it's a very. We quote Brigham Young's statements about it in the book. It's very disturbing, very grim, very violent language. We, in the book, we. We share a couple of examples that we found of blood atonement. One is a man from Harmony, an unidentified man from Harmony. And I don't know if Brendan Lee is a descendant of John D. Lee or not, but this is in southern

The Mormon Reformation, Blood Atonement, and Context

John Dehlin [00:44:39] Utah, Cedar City, kind of ish area. Is that right?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:44:42] Yeah, Cedar City, Harmony. So Isaac Haight, who is the stake president and militia major in Cedar City, he writes Brigham Young in early 1857 and said, A man from Harmony. He doesn't identify him. Perhaps it was John D. Lee. We just don't know because John D. Lee lived in Harmony. A man from Harmony has come to me, and he has confessed to having sex with one of his wives before they were married. And he says if he feels he is willing to give up his life to atone for that sin, if you feel like it is necessary. So Isaac Hate writes Brigham Young and asks about it. Young writes back and says, no, just tell the man, you know, if he. He's married the woman now, he says, tell him to repent and sin no more. There's another instance in which Isaac Hate writes Brigham Young and he tells of another man named Rasmus Anderson who has been having sexual relations. We don't know. He says, connection with a young girl who is his stepdaughter. And so the. The young girl, ironically, I don't know why she needed to repent. But anyways, the. The girl and Rasmus Anderson, they stand before the congregation, they repent of their sin. And then Haight and Bishop Philip Clinging Smith of Cedar City say, okay, don't do this again, or, you know, what it could lead to. Several years later, they're both caught having sex again outside of marriage. And so Haight writes Brigham Young, and he says, I sent him to California, which was a euphemism for we had him killed.

Rebecca [00:46:30] Brigham Young.

John Dehlin [00:46:31] Are you pretty sure that's what happened, that he was killed?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:46:33] Yes, because there are other accounts that say that Clingan Smith and a couple of other men from Cedar City take Rasmus Anderson because he said, okay, I'm here to offer up my life to atone for my. My sins. They take him, they dig a hole, they slit his throat, let him bleed into the hole, and then bury him. And again. So that was kind of a later reminiscent account, but because of this letter that Isaac Hate is writing and mentioning him by name, we knew. We know that this did happen. Young writes back, nothing about the man. He doesn't say anything about the man in his letter, but he. He gives advice about the girl and says, you know, let her be. She's 16 by then, and basically says, forgive her and let her be married.

John Dehlin [00:47:20] It's hard to imagine, you know, it

Barbara Jones Brown [00:47:21] happened, okay, blood atonement happened.

John Dehlin [00:47:23] It's hard to imagine this would be the only incident.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:47:26] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and we'll get into it, but the Mountain Meadows Massacre is not an incidence of blood atonement, but the fact that Isaac Haight, who is the man who orders it, carries out this very violent act In August of 1857, shortly before the Mountain Meadows Massacre, shows kind of a violent mindset, you know, that violence can be the answer, if that makes sense.

John Dehlin [00:47:59] And the Book of Mormon with the story about Nephi and Laban kind of sets the precedent.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:48:04] There's lots of violence in the Book of Mormon, that's for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I hope that kind of lays the groundwork of the context of what's going on in 1857. And again, readers can go into the detail and see all of our sources that we have for this. So that's the context. So the initial attack on the company at the Mountain Meadows takes place in the early morning of September 7, 1857, and it goes awry. Instead of just running off their cattle herd, several emigrants are killed during the attack. And they quickly circle their wagons and they dig in. They're preparing you know, you hear the expression circling their circle your wagons. They circle their wagons making kind of a wagon fort is what they called it.

John Dehlin [00:48:52] And they're coming from Arkansas, going to California, correct?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:48:56] Yes. And we do talk a lot about the immigrants themselves too. We want to name them by name and tell their story as well. And again, they're in the book so people can learn more about them.

John Dehlin [00:49:07] How important was the Parley P. Pratt murder as it related to the hysteria about the party?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:49:13] So absolutely, let's talk about Parley Pratt in just a minute.

John Dehlin [00:49:16] Okay?

Barbara Jones Brown [00:49:16] Yeah, but yes, I do wind at a question. Yes, let's get into that as well.

John Dehlin [00:49:20] Okay, yeah, when it's right for you.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:49:21] Yeah, yeah, so we'll just do it chronologically.

John Dehlin [00:49:24] Okay? Yeah, good.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:49:26] So two militiamen who see this happen, they're like, like oh crap, this didn't go as planned. And several people have been killed now. And so two of these militiamen, their named Joel White and Bill Stewart, they start riding back to Cedar City to report to Isaac hate what has happened. On their way back they come across two immigrant men several miles back who did not know that this attack had happened. They were riding behind the wagon train and gathering up loose cattle to bring them into the main herd. So these two militiamen encounter these two emigrant men and they make the horrible decision that they need to contain the situation. And so they decide to kill these two immigrant men. They fire on both of them. They kill one, his name was William Aiden. The other man, we don't know his name, but he got away. And so he starts, he puts spurs to his horse and he starts riding back to the mountain meadows, riding to his wagon train where he, he doesn't realize they're under siege. And the two militiam follow him. Make a long story short, the Latter Day Saint attackers see him get inside the corral. And now all of a sudden everybody inside that wagon corral are witnesses to the fact that white Latter Day Saints are involved in these wagon, in these cattle raids. And also some of them have been, some of these immigrants have been murdered. Now at this point, so then the Latter Day Saints are thinking, oh my goodness, what do we do? And the local leaders make a horrendous decision that they need to wipe out all of these witnesses except for the youngest children who quote, are too young to tell tales. So they murder all of the people by, by treacherous, by treachery. They, John D. Lee and a man named William Bateman carry a white flag out signaling that they're there to rescue these immigrants. Inside. Isaac Haight receives permission from the militia commander of Iron County. His name is William Dame. He lives at Parowan, Utah. He is also the state president at Parowan. Haight receives permission from Dame to call out more militiamen. They send them all out on Thursday night. They get there. Rebecca's ancestor Ira Allen was on the high council. He's there. They have a discussion and they say, this is what we're going to do. We're going to decoy them out. We're going to tell them that we're here to rescue them. We're going to leave them out of the. Of their safety, of their bulwark of wagons, and then we're going to slaughter them. Except for the youngest children. So they're all massacred, except for 17 children age 6 and under. Most of them were toddlers and babies. So that's how young the kids were that they spared. Very, very young children.

John Dehlin [00:52:28] Is it worth. I mean, I'm not trying to be graphic. Is it worth talking about how the.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:52:34] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:52:35] Or not. Is it better to just leave that to the book? Book.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:52:38] Book is very graphic.

John Dehlin [00:52:40] Okay.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:52:41] Like, again, it's not just like. Just like book one. I just want that I put in every single graphic detail, not to be salacious, but for readers to understand how hideous this crime was. And in fact, I always have people who've read the book talk to me, come up to me, and they'll say, descendants of victims and descendants of perpetrators. Or just others say I have to read a chapter, put it down, read another chapter, put it down. Not to discourage anyone from reading it. But, yeah, those initial chapters are. Are very detailed, but, yeah, they're. They're massacred in hideous ways. It's. It's horrific. So what happens? So there's another wagon train. It's a combined group of trains called the Turner Dukes Collins train, or just the Dukes train. And they come under attack. They are negotiate with the local bishop, Philotif Farnsworth, and a Native American named Ammon, and they say, okay, well, just turn over some of your cattle and then you can go. But they keep getting attacked and the cattle keep getting raided. None of them are killed, but they're right on the heels of this company from Arkansas and the Turner Dukes Collins train. They are from Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. So those who are from Arkansas, they know the people in the train ahead of them. They know who they are because they're friends. So once they get to California, they start reporting the news. They say, there's this massacre that's taken place. It was committed by Mormons and Indians. I'm always careful because some of those native people were baptized Mormons likely, who participated. So white Mormons and natives, and they say Mormons are involved in this. It's not just an Indian massacre. It's the Mormons want everybody to think. And so the editors in California, newspaper editors, they're trying to look for a motive. Why would Latter Day Saints be involved in massacring? Why? What's the motive? And so an editor comes in up with the theory. There was a Mormon apostle named Parley P. Pratt who was murdered in northwest Arkansas at Fort Smith in May of 1857. They must have killed all of these people because they're from Arkansas in retribution or as a matter of vengeance. So that's the theory that newspaper man in California shares. It gets picked up and that theory still exists today. We didn't find any evidence of that from the perpetrators themselves. Themselves. The perpetrators themselves give myriad excuses and motivations, but the, the one that's common with all of them is that this was a cover up that they had to wipe out witnesses. Not one of them says that the murder of Parley P. Pratt was a motive for them. So that's, that's what our research found. Also the thing with Pratt's murder is he was murdered by a man named Hector MacLean from San Francisco Francisco. And he was chasing Parley across the country because Parley had. Hector was an abusive husband. And his wife named Eleanor McLean left Hector to become Parley's plural wife. She joined the church, became a plural wife of Parley. Hector McLean was angry about that. Chase Parley across the country finally catches up with him in Arkansas, but he wasn't even in Arkansas who killed Parley P. Pratt. So yeah, that motivation just kind of doesn't stand up to the historical documentation. So.

John Dehlin [00:56:32] Okay,

Rebecca [00:56:35] I could ask the question. Perhaps this is a new narrative, I think, to a lot of people, the politically motivated, politically driven, the strategy which makes sense to show the power of Brigham Young and the church in the area. So along with Parley P. Pratt, there were many other things that I heard, you know, reasons, and all of them were sort of blaming the Baker franchise party. Right. Can you talk about some of those? Oh, the poisoning of the grain or they're fighting with people in town. And in preparation for talking to you today, I even looked at those motivations, which I think now are incorrect based on what you've learned with the new research and the new documents. Those still exist, for example, in Turley's article in 2007 in the Ensign. Those still exist, even in the gospel topic essays. I'm hoping that that can be updated because, you know, there was a lot of rumor. There was a lot of innuendo, like you said, the Joseph Smith gun, the Parley P. Pratt, the poisoning of the grain. Maybe talk to us a little bit about that. And if we put all those to rest, that is no longer the case. This is brand new, what you found in your book. So that's very important.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:57:38] Yeah, that's a great question. So Massacre at Mountain Meadows came out in 2000. And again, that. That one. That the narrative of that book only goes up to essentially right after the massacre. So it only goes up to right at 1857. Now, we do know that there was conflict. There was some conflict caused by this tension by local people. Instead of selling grain to immigrants, they're keeping it, they're hoarding it for themselves because of, you know, the siege mentality, of course. So we do have some contemporary sources that talk about there was some conflict. But studying the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows massacre led to new discoveries. And that's kind of the nature of the historical craft. The more you study something or the deeper you dig or a different period you study, it always brings new insights, and it hopefully should. And so this strategy of encouraging cattle ready that came out as we're studying the aftermath and seeing, wait a minute, there's all these other attacks happening as late as October 3, 1857, for example. And then looking at those stories of conflict between these immigrants and local people, I started to see that a lot of those accounts came later. Those were in the aftermath again. So studying the aftermath and then watching how those rumors grew over time, while looking at the aftermath math, I started to see. We started to see that these. A lot of these came later, and they're perpetrate. They're. They're shared by perpetrators who are seeking to blame the victims or victim blame for.

Rebecca [00:59:20] To.

Barbara Jones Brown [00:59:20] As an excuse for the crime that they had committed. So they're growing stories about victim blaming. And so it's been very important to us to put those rumors to rest and very important to descendants of victims. So one example, and actually this came out in book one, but we also talk about in book two, Vengeance is Mine. There were a lot of people who died from some kind of mysterious illness at Corn Creek, which is where these Arkansas immigrants had encamped. And after they pass through, they leave an ox that had died, and they say, well, we'll give this to the Indians. To eat the local Pavant Indians. And so they eat that. Some local Indians die. A local boy named Proctor Robinson dies. A woman who is also skinning the. The.

Rebecca [01:00:10] These

Barbara Jones Brown [01:00:13] cattle, she becomes very ill. There's very. There's detailed descriptions of all these illnesses. Now, the people in 1850s, they have no understanding of microbes and germ theory in 1850s. Yeah. And so they say, oh, well, these people must have poisoned this ox. They must have poisoned the springs. What we did is we took all of these symptoms that are listed in these historical sources, shared them independently with a panel of doctors. They all independently looked at these symptoms. And then we met with them. They all came back, and they said, this looks like anthrax. All of them. Anthrax is a disease pass through spores that can pass from cattle to humans. And so we say that this mysterious disease, in fact, was not poisoning, but was anthrax. So that's just the kind of work we did to debunk these rumors and really show that these people were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and were innocent. Completely innocent.

The Wagon Train, the Victims, and Surviving Children

Rebecca [01:01:16] I think it's also important to talk about the wealth of this wagon train. I don't think people recognize this, you know, that they'd made this trip several times. They had. They were. My ancestor, just a day or so after the attack, was one of the ones that was overseeing rebranding the cattle with the church's brand, you know, so that it could.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:01:36] Yeah, it was actually. They were rebranded with John D. Lee's brand.

Rebecca [01:01:39] That's right. The brand right there. And I know that my ancestor supposedly was given a wagon and then, you know, sent somewhere else. So some people feel that maybe the wagon wealth of the wagon train was a motivation. They certainly did take advantage after the fact of, you know, all the cattle and everything they had. So did that play at all into it and what you found? Because that's a legitimate question. I think people would ask.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:02:01] Yeah. So all of the cattle and. And back then, wealth was in cattle, primarily. So all of the cattle end up on the Harmony Range near John D. Lee's home. And he said that he kept those cattle for the Indians and said if any of them came to him, he would turn over cattle to them. They are branded with his brand. And then. Yeah. So the wagons. That would be like getting a car at the time. Yes. Your ancestor, Ira Ellen did. Did end up with one of the wagons. That's that we found historical evidence of that. So some of the leaders got wagons, and then they. Some of the leaders of the massacre looted the bodies and took, you know, watches, things like that. So. Absolutely. But yeah, primarily the wealth was in, was in cattle. And so when John D. Lee goes up to report the massacre, they wait for almost two weeks, more than two weeks, almost three weeks. And when, when John D. Lee goes up to report the massacre to Brigham Young, he lies to Young and he tells them that the Indians took all the property and that the massacre was committed only by Indians.

John Dehlin [01:03:12] He lies to Brigham Young.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:03:13] Yeah, and so then, but then when Lee comes back, he says he tells all the local people, oh, Brigham Young told me to keep all the cattle on my range. So yeah, but absolutely, wealth seemed to be a.

John Dehlin [01:03:29] So I mean the. Well, I guess there's so many places we could go. Let me just say really quickly, we did get one question that I wanted to ask just because it's a bit timely. I think it also could be a decent segue whenever you're ready to talk about what happened to the surviving children. Because I think that's an important part of the story. But somebody basically, Jesse Nashville James writes, if it wasn't blood atonement, then why were children under 8 years old put in a wagon and saved? He basically believes that, that the fact that Mormon children under the eight being saved indicates or suggests that blood atonement informed this practice. Because I believe part of the blood atonement Mormon doctrine is that kids under that aid is the age of accountability. And so the kids weren't accountable.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:04:23] Yeah, absolutely. That is a theory that's been out there for many years. What we found, what the historical research showed was that, that some babies were killed, some children age 7 and younger were killed. And so it just doesn't stack up to the research, the documentation. So the oldest there was two 6 year olds who were spared, one 5 year old, one 4 year old, and the rest were age 2 and under. So it just doesn't. Because there were children who were younger than eight who were also murdered. It just doesn't stack up. And also again, the historical sources, the perpetrators, when they talk about who was spared, why those children were spared, every single one of them said the children who were too young to tell tales were the words that they used. So I don't think the historical documentation supports that.

Brigham Young's Role and Responsibility

John Dehlin [01:05:18] Okay.

Rebecca [01:05:19] I think as our book club was reading the book and of course chatting back and forth online, I think of course the big question everybody always wants, wants to know is about Brigham Young and his role. And you know, like you said, Isaac Hake always writing letters back to Brigham Young in this case, he did the same thing, you know, and people have brought up, well, here's a climate that exists in Utah where they felt the need to ask, should we murder these people? So it is the big question, and it's a very complicated answer. I know, but if you can just talk a little bit about that, I think that's what everybody wants to know. You know, Brigham Young, what was his role? And also another question. I think I asked you this before when I interview you. Had you discovered some things that were extremely unfavorable about Brigham Young's involvement in the book, would you have included it? I mean, that's what you would have

Barbara Jones Brown [01:06:04] had to as a historian. Yeah, I'm a professional historian.

Rebecca [01:06:07] Exactly.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:06:08] I'm true to my craft and true to historical sources. And yeah. In fact, sometimes I say, yeah, I would love. If there was historical documentation, I would love to be the one to say, yeah, he did order. You know, but that's just not what the historical documentation bears out.

John Dehlin [01:06:28] Brigham Young directed that.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:06:29] He ordered a massacre. You know, what we did find is he was encouraging this cattle raiding. Absolutely. There are a few things to me that provide additional evidence that he didn't order the massacre. One, of course, is the letter. So Isaac Hayd on September 7th. Once. Once this siege happens and the two militiamen make it back to Isaac Haight and they report, oh, we killed these immigrants. One of them got back in the wagon corral. Haight's like, ugh, we're in a muddle. He sends a letter north to Brigham Young saying, ah, what should we do here? Young writes back on. He receives that letter from an express writer on September 10. This was pre telegraph. He receives that letter. He writes a letter back saying the Indians will do as they please. Which again, is this policy he's been preaching and writing and talk. Talking about. He says, but you must not meddle with them. If those who are there will go in peace, let them go. That letter arrives on September 13th in Cedar City. Now, here's if. Yes, exactly. So that's one thing.

Rebecca [01:07:37] If.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:07:37] If Brigham Young had ordered the massacre, then when Isaac Haight and William Dame of Parowan, they're the two armchair leaders, they don't go out to the massacre. They make sure that they're not there. They just tell other people to carry it out. But anyways, when they ARR. In the early morning of September 12th and they see the carnage, they start arguing over who's going to take blame for this. And they start arguing. Haight says. Dame says, oh, I've got, we've got to report this to Governor Young, President Young. And Haight says, well, how are you going to report it as an Indian massacre? And Dame says, I'm not so sure I'd report it as an Indian massacre. Maybe we need to tell the truth. And Dame says, if, if you, if you tell the truth about this thing, then I will find you in hell. And so they are arguing vehemently over how they're going to report it, who's going to take blame for it, who's responsible for it. If Brigham Young had ordered it, they would just be, yeah, we did. We did what, you know, Young told us to do. And then also when. So they convinced.

John Dehlin [01:08:46] Unless they were protecting him. Him.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:08:48] But, but, but again, they're just privately arguing. They're privately arguing and militiamen are watching. They're. They're watching what's happening. And we have their accounts of what they see happening.

John Dehlin [01:08:58] Okay.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:09:02] And then so, so Hate and Dame, again, they're just armchair leaders. They, they want Lee to be the fall guy for this. So they tell John D. Lee, okay, you go up, you go up when you go up to General Conference. And in the fall, in early October, late, late September, you go tell Brigham Young, you report him what happened. Tell him what happened and tell him this was an Indian massacre. And, and John D. Lee says to Haight, well, why don't you just write him about it? And Hate says, oh, you could tell him better than I. So John D. Lee arrives in Brigham Young's office on September 29, 1857. And Brigham Young, he, Lee asked for a private interview with Young, but Young says, no, I want my assistant church historian Wilfred Woodruff to come in the office with me. So he has Wilford come in. And Woodruff records that day what Lee is saying. And that's why we know what Lee told Young and that he's lying to him. He says it was an all Indian massacre. He says the Indians took all of the property. And then he says, we just went out, we the militiament, and we just went out to bury the dead. And Young and Woodruff believe him. And in fact, Young is so upset about what he's hear heard, we know he leaves his office after that interview or maybe during that interview. And his clerk says he leaves the office feeling ill, he's sick. And he goes up into City Creek Canyon to kind of just decompress. But after that point, Young never talks about his strategy. He never encourages cattle raiding anymore. We can't find a single incident of that so perhaps we don't know, we don't have a source for this, but perhaps he thinks, did my policy lead to this?

John Dehlin [01:10:52] I'll just say one and I'm going to just give a shout out to the book again. The book is Vengeance Is Mine, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath by Richard E. Turley. And our guest today, Barbara Jones Brown. Please pause and go buy this book right now on Amazon or at Benchmark Books or wherever you get your books, because we want to support this book and make it a national bestseller more than it already is. But I will say that what I was listening and again, the audio narrator of this audio, I think does a great job. And when he's reciting some of the sermons that were given both by Brigham Young and others, regardless of whether Brigham Young directed it, and we've already mentioned this a little bit, the sermons that are being given at general conference or in local regional conferences throughout Utah, they're not just kind of like aggressive to me, they're violent. They're shockingly violent and apocalyptic and. And that's pre the massacre. So while we can't really pin in our Brigham Young, if that rhetoric were being used today, it's more extreme than. Let's just pick your worst politician today. Way worse than that. So I mean, is it fair to say there's something there?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:12:11] 100%. 100%. And that's our conclusion. And it's this, interestingly enough, it's the same conclusion that one Juanita Brooks came to back in 1950, that all of these things, including this violent rhetoric by leaders, created the tinderbox conditions that just a single match would just cause us to blow up. So absolutely. And of course Brigham Young is responsible for encouraging this cattle rating. Yes, it was a wartime strategy as a result of this conflict. But yes, he did encourage that. And did he intend to for people to be murdered because of it? We don't find any evidence of that. We find evidence of him saying, we don't want a single blood to be spilled so that we can win public opinion. But ultimately we have a massacre. And so yes, yeah, church leaders definitely in that rhetoric definitely plays a role in what happened.

Rebecca [01:13:05] And that's kind of how I finally came to terms with my ancestors involvement that I had to look at the environment that he lived. In other words, I would have to say, you know, he was just a horrible, horrible person. But there were so many other factors. So learning more about that kind of helped me come to terms with his role in it. I think one thing to Talk about that John brought up just a few minutes ago is the children. Because of course, they are the link to the survivors today. What did happen to the children? It's tragic. It's wonderful that they lived and survived and so, you know, their descendants are here. But yeah, I don't know if everyone knows exactly what happened, happened then because it was a long, drawn out process to even return them to where they belonged. So maybe tell everyone about the children.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:13:46] This is a very important part of the aftermath story. So I'm glad you asked about that. So at the massacre scene, ironically, the bishop of Cedar City named Philip Clingan Smith, he gathers up the surviving children. They turn over some of the children that, that they deem to be too old, that they could talk to be murdered. They load the surviving children who are screaming in their mother. In their dead mother's arms or just wandering around. Wait, did you see?

John Dehlin [01:14:19] There's a sorting where they. They choose some final kids to kill.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:14:24] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:14:24] Oh, wow. Okay.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:14:25] And again, this is one of the really grim details of the book. They put them in the back of a wagon and the wagon goes north, north to the ranch of Rachel Hamlin, Little shanty there. She and one of the militiamen's wives named Carolyn Beck are both living there. They care for these screaming, blood stained, traumatized children. Through that first night, an adopted Indian son, a Shoshone son of Jacob and Rachel Hamlin named Albert, says the children cried all night. Night. It's really tough. Again, some of these babies are nursing babies. The next day, John D. Lee pretends that he's acting as an agent for the Indians. And he pretends like the Indians have earned these children, like the Indians that are there own these children. And so he trades goods. They give blankets and things for these children to. To local Native Americans. And Rachel Hamlin describes it as a sham. She argues that she wants to keep all three of the little Dunlap girls. One of the. The youngest has been shot through with a bullet through their arm. Her arm is just hanging there and she says, you cannot move her. And then when her two older sisters beg to not be separated from their baby sister, Rachel stands up to John Delee and says, I'm keeping all three of them. And those were the only three children, children who are allowed to remain together. The other children are divided up and spread throughout different Mormon homes in Cedar City and Santa Clara, south of the meadows, as newspaper reports start spreading across the nation. In 1857, I talked about some of them coming out of California. Word reaches Arkansas One of these articles and a man named William C. Mitchell, who is the grandfather of. Of one of these children, he learns about that there are surviving children. And so he starts writing to the Arkansas delegation asking for help, the federal government's help in finding and retrieving those children and bringing them back to their relatives in Arkansas. This is one of the saddest stories. William C. Mitchell knows that his grand baby was a little baby. And so he's hoping to. That one of these children is his. His grandbaby. When federal officials gather up the children and return them to Arkansas, he's so excited because he thinks one of these little babies is his. And it turns out it's not his grandbaby and his grandbaby has been murdered. So again, that's. That's one of the. The young children who was killed at Mountain Meadows. So they're returned to their families in Arkansas, and tragically, they're there when they civil war breaks out. And many of their towns that they return to are burned to the ground. These children should have been living in peace in California with their. With their parents and families, but they go on to lead admirable lives and have families of their own. And we have now friends who are descendants of victims because of those children.

John Dehlin [01:17:39] One of the really disturbing parts for me was the. When John D. Lee returns back from visiting Brigham Young, he's trying to manage the narrative, probably along with others. We've already talked about it a little bit, but there was even theories being spread that the women were sex workers and that's why they were killing, that

Barbara Jones Brown [01:18:02] they were rotten with the pox, which was 19th century parlance for veneration. Again, this is part of the horrific victim blaming that our book debunks. We quote a forensic anthropologist who had later studied some of their bones and ruled out that. Absolutely. We didn't believe it in the first place. But yeah, the perpetrators just start saying horrific things about these people in order to, I think, assuage their own guilt

John Dehlin [01:18:29] and to protect the church. Baby.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:18:31] Sure. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:18:32] Yeah.

Rebecca [01:18:33] Well, and that's why I'd like to see this narrative, your narrative in the. This book, make it into mainstream church sources. Because like I said, the Gospel topics essay is more in line with, you know, there was something wrong with the people.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:18:45] It has not updated, you know.

Rebecca [01:18:47] Yeah, an updated article in the Liahona, something like that, you know, to let. Let people understand. And it's part of the legacy of this, you know, wonderful people traveling across the country and fate. So I would like to see That

Barbara Jones Brown [01:18:59] I hope I'd like to see that too. I, I no longer work for the church history department, but I, if anyone out there, I'm with you. Like, yeah, we can encourage that. And again, I think the more I can, you know, Rick and I can talk about this book and have people read it, that we can disseminate that narrative. But yeah, and let's write letters.

Rebecca [01:19:17] Let's write letters. Everyone write a letter. And then, of course, a lot of your book, unlike the first book, deals with the legal aftermath. Yes, there was a lot. And it was tied into the political system in Utah. It was tied into the fight for statehood. There was so much going on and much bigger picture and polygamy, all of it. So I know we probably need another episode.

John Dehlin [01:19:40] Well, I mean, I think whether or not Brigham ordered it, I think the really big question that we should probably spend some time on is to what extent was Brigham Young and or others guilty of engaging in a coverup? So.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:19:58] Absolutely. Yeah. And so that the book does go into the COVID up as well, because again, so book one ends essentially at 1857 and says there's going to be a second book that's going to talk about after. Here's the second book. This is it.

John Dehlin [01:20:10] But follow whatever chronology you were planning because we don't want to short circuit.

Rebecca [01:20:13] Sure.

Federal Investigations and the Pursuit of Justice

Barbara Jones Brown [01:20:14] So. So in 1859, I mentioned that federal officials come south and they gather up these children and have them returned to their relatives. They also come down and they, they're. They start investigating the massacre. So the man who gathers up the children and who's responsible for that, his name was Jacob Forney and he replaces Young as Superintendent of Indian Affairs. So he is a federal appointee from the east that comes out. He's a good man. I just really admire him and his work. And he is interviewing perpetrators. He interviews John D. Lee, he interviews Isaac Haight, John M. Higby, and here's another thing too, when he. So Lee goes on and on and on in his account that these people have done these horrible things and they deserve to die. But when they. Jacob Forney says, when he interviews Isaac Haight and his counselor, John M. Higby, who are leaders, ringleaders, neither one of them give any reasons for white motive at all. They don't blame anyone. So that's another reason. I'm like, that's interesting. So he starts gathering it up, all this information, and he starts heading north with those children he's gathered. Coming south at the same time is an army contingent and a federal judge A federally appointed judge named John Cradlebaugh. And so they end up camping together. Cradlebaugh meets the children, interviews them. Forney gives to Cradlebaugh a list of all, a long list of all the men he believes are involved, the militiamen who are involved in this. And he writes back east and says, this will all be cleared up to these, these men. I have all of the evidence, I have their names. When this is brought to trial, we can quickly bring these people to justice. John J. Cradlebaugh takes that list, he has that we know that from those letters. He comes down to Cedar City and he starts. He rents an empty house and he starts holding court, if you will, in Cedar City. And by now a lot of people have abandoned Cedar City. The Iron Mission, which many people were sent there to start, has failed. And probably some people want to leave after the massacre, like Rebecca's ancestor who goes out of Dodge, like my ancestor as well. So under cover of darkness, people start coming to Cradlebaugh's house in the middle of the night and knocking at his door in the dark. And he starts having people come in and they start telling him what they know of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But they're so afraid. They say, if you see me on the street, don't ever acknowledge that I came here to tell you anything. So there are people that are trying to tell the truth about what happened, whether they're just local people or perpetrators. We know one perpetrator tells the whole story. We believe it's Philip Clinging Smith because he later turns state's evidence and is off. He's, he's absolved from any prosecution because of that. So Cradlebaugh is working on prosecuting the case. And then the army is called back from southern Utah. They're called back up to the north. And so Cradlebaugh's like, I'm not safe to stay down here by myself. And so he leaves with them. And so the case is not prosecuted at that time. What happens next is the massacre becomes politicized. So another judge, federally appointed judge, he has all of that information that's given to him by Cradlebaugh and Forny. He has an all non Mormon jury, but he refuses to go down to Cedar City to try the case. He does it in Nephi, so he can't get witnesses to come in, can't capture any of those who are on the list of being possibly guilty, and he declines to try the case. The reason why, and the reason why it takes so long for it to be tried is the Mountain Meadows Massacre becomes Used as a political weapon. Local non Mormons who are in the territory, they realize that the only way to take control of Utah Territory is if you disenfranchise the Mormons. So you can't be a non Mormon and run for office. Is not too much different today sometimes. But you can't be a non Mormon and run for office in Utah and win. It's impossible because most of the electorate is lds. So only Mormons are going to win political office and have political control and so forth. So they determine the only way to take control and to break up the theocracy and so forth is to disenfranchise Mormons so that they can't serve on juries, so that they can't vote, so on and so forth, forth. And so they refuse to bring the Mountain Meadows Massacre to trial. When they finally do in the 1870s, they, they don't want a conviction of John D. Lee, who is one of the perpetrators who has been caught and put on trial. They want it to look like if you have, see, you can't get a, you can't, you can't even get a conviction for someone as notorious as John D. Lee for this notorious crime in Utah as long as Mormons can vote and as long as they can serve on juries and as long as they can be judges. I'm going really, really fast over the, the surface here. You can read all the details in the book, but. And so they actually, they don't want Lee to be convicted. And then they try and say, see, you need to disenfranchise Latter Day Saints in Utah. What happens in John D. Lee's second trial is a new federal judge is, is appointed. His name is Sumner Howard. He comes out to Utah. He doesn't have a dog in the fight. He just wants to try the man who's on trial and go after all of the criminals. So he wins a conviction of John D. Lee with a Mormon jury. And he says, look, you can try Mormons or you can try and convict another Mormon in Utah. These folks that are trying to disenfranchise Mormons, they decide, okay, Mountain Meadows isn't the tool that's working for this. So what do they decide to do? They decide to go after polygamy. And that's when all the anti polygamy legislation starts. And that disenfranchises Latter Day Saints in Utah. Utah women who've been exercising the franchise since 1870, they lose their right to vote. Utah men who are support or are polygamists, they lose Lose the right to vote and all of these non Mormons run for office. They sweep all the offices and they win and they become political leaders in Utah. So that's at the tail end of this book and this story.

John Dehlin [01:26:54] Dang.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:26:55] Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot.

John D. Lee's Trial and Execution

Rebecca [01:26:59] So how many years after this is so interesting? Finally, is anybody brought to justice, quote, justice? And only one person? I mean, a lot of people question John D. Lee, scapegoat, you know, fall guy, this kind of thing. People cite reasons like, well, in 1961, his blessings were fully restored from the. By the church. You know, was he somebody that just kind of took the fall for everybody? There is that line of thinking that.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:27:26] Yeah, well, sure, that's that. And absolutely, John D. Lee was the only man who was prosecuted and executed, convicted and executed for the crime, which. Which many, many other men should have also gone down. However, John D. Lee was not innocent. He witnesses saw him murder people at the Mountain Meadows and he was definitely a ringleader in it. So I'm against the death penalty. But did he get what he deserved in being convict? Convicted? Absolutely. But many other people should have been as well. So to make a long story short. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:28:01] Did Brigham Young know and approve of the capital punishment of John D. Lee? And is it worth noting the familial ish relationship between Brigham Young and John de Lee?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:28:15] Sure, yeah. So this is another legend that we debunk. It's actually in the first book, more in detail in Massacre at Mountain Meadows. But so a lot of people say, well, John D. Lee was the adopted son of Brigham Young. So to understand what's going on with that, the early Latter Day Saints in Nauvoo believed in something called the law of adoption. And so you could be sealed to someone not just as a spouse or as a. A literal, you know, child or adopted child. You could be sealed to people just as fellow adults, men to men, even men to men.

John Dehlin [01:28:56] And this is an orthodox, traditional LDS church.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:28:59] Yes, in Illinois. It died out shortly after they got to Utah. So most modern Latter Day Saints have never even heard of this. I didn't know about it until I started studying it. So church leaders would have other men adopted to them through a sealing ceremony in the temple. Brigham Young had 50, some 50 men sealed to him or adopted to him through the law of adoption. John D. Lee was one of them. So they were both full grown men, John, you know, it's not like Brigham Young raised John D. Lee or anything like that. They were 11 years apart. So that's what that was. But again, the law of adoption just kind of fell out of practice and even out of meaning not long after the Saints arrived in Utah. So that was their relationship. But again, Brigham Young had multiple. Multiple men adopted to him.

John Dehlin [01:29:48] And would he have known that John D. Lee was going to be executed? And would he have potentially been behind a scapegoating where, okay, we got to pick somebody, but let's protect all the others?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:30:01] Sort of, yeah. So, again, that's another myth that we looked at. And what we found was nine men are indicted for the crime in 1874. John de Lee was one of them. So the others that I've talked about before were, of course, William Dane, name Isaac Haight, John Higby, Philip Clinging Smith, William Stewart, who was the one who killed William Aiden, the immigrant, and William Aiden shortly after the initial attack. Samuel Jukes and a couple of others that, let's see, I can't think of at the top of my head right now, but make a long story short, Johnny Lee gets caught. He gets arrested, and in fact, there's a story that we have in the book.

John Dehlin [01:30:46] Oh, the others were on the lamp.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:30:48] Oh, yeah, they were. Yeah, they were on the lamp. William Dame doesn't go on the Lamb because he knows the only evidence that he gave the approval to Isaac Haight to, okay, yeah, go carry this out, call out the militia and go wipe these people out, is verbal. And only one person witnessed that verbal agreement named William Barton. And that's. That's it. So there's no. There's no written documentation or anything. So he is arrested, he turns himself in, but there's not enough evidence to. To show that he was this silent armchair leader. We know that from lots of other sources. They talk about that this happened, but it's. Nothing's written down. So he. He gets off.

John Dehlin [01:31:31] Would Brigham have helped shelter and hide the others that were convicted? Do we know?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:31:37] So one thing that's interesting is William Dame, he is called on a mission, conveniently, and I can't remember the exact year, it's in the book, but. So he is called on a mission at some point before these trials overseas. But then when he is indicted, he does turn himself in, and he spends a lot of time in prison just awaiting trial. There's no habeas corpus being practiced. But eventually they. What they. What the attorneys do is they. They get John D. Lee, and they say to John D. Lee, okay, if you give us a satisfactory confession, if you tell us everything you know, then. Then we'll let you Go. You can turn state's evidence and we'll let you go. So they go after one fish, hoping to get a big bigger fish, right. William Dame. So Lee gives his confession, but he doesn't name anyone who's currently in custody. He only names people that are on the lam or that have died. And so the prosecutors, they take that confession and they say, oh, well, this confession isn't satisfactory. So now we're just going to use your confession to prosecute you. We've got all this stuff. So Lee is furious. He feels double crossed. He's like, wait a minute, I was turning state's evidence and now you're using it against me. Me.

John Dehlin [01:32:52] Now hadn't you published a book of the account or not?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:32:55] Yes. So John D. Lee's defense attorney, his name was William Bishop of Nevada. And in the first trial I mentioned the prosecutors, they're not really even trying to get a conviction for Lee. And if anyone wants to, you don't have to take my word for it, you can read the trial testimony. If you go to mountainmeadowsmassacre.org and click trial Transcript, anyone can read all of the transcripts. But what is fascinating about that first trial is they rarely talk about John D. Lee. They don't produce any witnesses that say that they saw John D. Lee kill anyone. And they keep talking about Brigham Young and George A. Smith, the men who aren't on trial. And so it's clearly they're, they're putting Young and Smith on trial in the court of public opinion. The second trial, as I mentioned, they bring in a new attorney, Sumner Howard. He goes right after Lee and he brings in eyewitnesses. And church leaders have, have been offering for years to say, hey, if you want us, we can bring witnesses to the trial, if you want us to help. So they help round up some eyewitnesses of the massacre. Nephi Johnson, a couple of other men. They testify that Samuel Knight and Samuel, oh, I'm forgetting his last name, Sam McMurdy. The three of them testified that they see John D. Lee murder people. They personally witness it. Sumner Howard wins the conviction of John D. Lee and then he starts to continue to hope to prosecute others. So I always thought, and I think most people think that John D. Lee's convicted, end of story. But in fact, Sumner Howard is going over other perpetrators of the crime and they're trying to catch them, but they're living on the lam and the government kind of loses interest in funding this case to pay somebody to hunt down these These perpetrators, who are spread out all over the country, you need money to do that. There's not a lot of funding, so there's not a lot of people who are interested in hunting these folks down. And eventually the case just dies out from public interest. And so John D. Lee was the only one. But. But what's interesting is Sumner Howard even says, I think if I can get Lee to talk, I think maybe I can go as high as getting Brigham Young. He's open to going after Brigham Young, but nothing ever comes up.

John Dehlin [01:35:23] All right, Rebecca, let's do a firing round of questions and try and get as many questions in our remaining time

Rebecca [01:35:28] as possible ready to go.

John Dehlin [01:35:29] So we'll keep it. You go first. We'll take turns.

Rebecca [01:35:31] I definitely feel that Brigham Young encouraged people that were involved to leave. My ancestor was sent to Hiram to settle, as I understand it. So that seems to me that perhaps Brigham Young said, just go over that direction.

Access to Church Documents and Research Integrity

Barbara Jones Brown [01:35:42] Can I jump in and say one thing? So one thing I've noticed, not just in this story, but just studying church history in general. Like everyone's ancestor was a bodyguard of Joseph Smith.

Rebecca [01:35:52] Of course. Of course.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:35:53] Or anytime is anytime somebody went to settle something, well, Brigham Young sent him there. So I'm just. I mean, that could be true. I'm just saying just be careful of Brigham Young wasn't. In fact, I mean, he's sending a lot of people, but not every single soul. Was he saying, oh, my ancestor was sent to this neighborhood by Brigham Young?

Rebecca [01:36:14] No. And that makes sense. And again, this is why, you know, we say these things that we learn anecdotally from our families. But you're looking at the source, doctor. And that's a question that I have. You didn't use Mormonism Unveiled at all in your book.

John Dehlin [01:36:27] That's Lee's book, right?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:36:28] You asked me about that book.

Rebecca [01:36:29] Yeah, you did. And so I think it's important for people to understand that you and Richard had access to documents that no one has ever been able to look at before. Documents that Juanita, you know, was desperate to get her hands on, knew existed. The firsthand accounts. Now, I think that's very interesting to just even bring up that those first hand accounts, the 10 testimonies that were given, you know, very close to the time, no one else has ever seen those. So when you talk about debunking, you do mean that you're looking at things that no one has ever been able to see before. So maybe talk a little bit about that, because I think that's kind of Important, just these first hand sources and the things that you're learning, no one else has ever been able to get their hands on those, right?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:37:05] Absolutely. And I think that's a great tragedy. Juanita Brooks learns, she knows that there was an assistant church historian named Andrew Jensen who in 1890, the First Presidency sends him to southern Utah to interview perpetrators and witnesses of just people who were living in Cedar City at the time. And they send a letter with him and they say, show this letter to local people. And this letter says, and we have a copy of it, but it says, we know that a lot of witnesses to this crime and participants in the crime are dying. Please tell Brother Jensen everything you know of the crime and including there's perpetrators that talk to him and gather all up, all these interviews. And then someday, when the time is right, we'll make these available to the world. Juanina Brooks knew that those documents existed, those affidavits existed. She goes to the church headquarters to try and get permission for them. She's denied access to them, which was a tragedy. We got access to them and we. A lot of the information I've been talking about and sharing and that's cited in our books are from those documents. And if anyone wants to see those documents, holographs, pictures of those documents with transcripts of them, they are now published in a book called Mountain Meadows Massacre Documents. The Andrew Jensen and David Morris collections go online. You can grab that book, read them. It's, it's fascinating. So, yeah, I mean, because we had so much access to everything in the church archives, which now historians, other historians do have that access to now as well. And we had a team of researchers that scoured the country, found information about the Mountain Meadows massacre in 30 in archives in 31 states. We had a mountain of research to work with. So, you know, anyone who is hearing this or is interested in Mountain Meadows Massacre, you don't have to take my word for it, but I would invite you to read the book, look at the documentation and come up with your own conclusions.

John Dehlin [01:39:13] All right, we'll keep going back and forth. So you're next, Rebecca. So this question, I hope you receive it okay. It's one of the most commonly asked questions I received when I kind of announced, when we announced that we were going to be covering this book. And I, I apologize that it's about another author, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I'm sure you've gotten this before. Please don't take offense. The question is, can you ask her what her Thoughts are around Will Bagley, the late Will Bagley and other Morton Mountain Metals massacre scholars who believe that Turley's book. I don't like that phrasing.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:39:50] Turley had co authors Barbara and Turley's

John Dehlin [01:39:53] book and maybe the previous book believe that these books are part of the COVID up. Now, I know that's an offensive question, but I also know you're strong.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:40:04] Oh, yeah, no, I get when it comes to Mount Meadows, you wouldn't believe the questions and that. I don't feel defensive at all.

John Dehlin [01:40:12] Why would people say that?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:40:14] I would just say. I would just invite people to read the book. Anyone who has read these, particularly Vengeance is Mine, says, says, boy, this is not apologetic. This is really. They tell me how much they appreciate how forthcoming it is and how willing it is to just say, yeah, there's some horrible things that happen. And so I would just invite people to read the book and draw their own conclusions. So, okay. Does that answer the question?

John Dehlin [01:40:43] Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't even know if you'd be able to answer. Answer this, but if, like Bagley was alive, sure. Do you know what criticism he might make of either of these books?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:40:52] Well, I can. Sadly, Will, who's a friend of mine, died before this book came out, but I can tell you about the first book. He felt like it did place too much blame on like this conflict between victims and local folks. And I would say, based on my additional research, I would agree with that today. Sure.

John Dehlin [01:41:12] With his criticism of the first book.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:41:14] Yeah, with that, with that aspect of the first book. Will went with the theory that the massacre was due to religious fanaticism. And these people just wiped out these other. These people from Arkansas because Parley P. Pratt had been killed in Arkansas. So that was his theory. I disagree with that theory. And the reason why I disagree with it is just. It just is historical documentation doesn't hold up to it. So. So, so I know that and, and will believe that Brigham Young ordered the massacre based. And he would always acknowledge there is no hard evidence to show it based on circumstantial evidence. I believe Brigham Young ordered it. And again, I don't. I don't really care what people choose to believe. I would just invite people to. To read all they can about the massacre and then draw their own conclusions.

John Dehlin [01:42:02] Love it. Love it. Your turn.

Rebecca [01:42:05] Do you feel that you did have access to all the documents, that they're ready to feel that there's anything that's been left out? That's the question that comes up. You Know, new information. And I agree. A lot of things that Will Bagley brought up that he disagreed with in our book club we read in September. We had what we called a Mountain Meadows mash up in the good book club. Everybody could pick any book they wanted to read of a huge variety. We had a huge conversation about it, you know, and it was really exciting to see the different points of view. And everybody did agree that in Vengeance of Mine Is Mine, you definitely took it a step farther as far as debunking some of those rumors and things like that, so everybody could really appreciate that. One of the questions was, with the documents, do you feel there's any sense that the Church might have withheld things, Things that would have been more painted in a negative light?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:42:50] No. We had 100% access to everything. And again, we should share the genesis of this idea.

Rebecca [01:42:56] Exactly.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:42:57] So Rick Turley had the idea to write the book in the early 2000s, and his mindset was, look, we are never going to move past this very, very hideous stain on our history by just trying to pretend it didn't happen, not talking about it, covering it up. The only way we're going to move past this is by shining all the sunshine we can on it, making it not a taboo topic to talk about anymore, and just laying it all out, saying sorry, owning it, and only then can we seek reconciliation and peace. So that was his mindset starting out. There was never a mindset of, oh, we're just gonna write more books to cover this up. It was, let's get it out in the open. And he went to the first Presley and quorum of the 12 when he had the idea to do this and said, this is what I want to do, will I have support for doing this in the church history department, and I don't want any opposition. And I also don't. We're gonna let the chips fall where they may. I don't want any censorship. This did not go through the correlation department. It never would have made it through. It's too violent.

John Dehlin [01:44:05] It reminds me of Leonard Arrington.

Rebecca [01:44:06] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:44:07] Yes.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:44:07] Yeah. So that's the better outcome.

John Dehlin [01:44:09] With a better outcome.

Rebecca [01:44:10] Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:44:11] So I think. Yeah. So I think if you know the genesis of why these books exist, and I will say again, just from personal experience and then watching it from institutional experience, it's just laying it all out and just saying, this is the horrific. I. I'm proud. I'm proud of the Church for allowing this to take place. Rick and I, when we wrote the book, we wrote it independently. We Weren't working for the church history department at the end of it anymore, but for the church to support. Yeah. Okay. Let's just tell it all and get it out there, and only then can we move on.

John Dehlin [01:44:50] Love it.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:44:50] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:44:51] All right. Some guy named Landon Brophy. And I'm just kidding. He's Rebecca's co host.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:44:55] Hi, Landon. Landon loves to ask questions.

Rebecca [01:44:58] It's awesome.

John Dehlin [01:44:59] Is it possible that they went after Brigham Young because they knew they couldn't get a conviction in Utah unless they got Young on the hot seat and he'd have to save himself? Which is exactly what happened. That's his question.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:45:12] Sure. I mean, absolutely there were political motivations to. To go after Brigham Young. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we found the same evidence that was found at the time. There's just. There's not. The evidence just doesn't document that he ordered a massacre. He did other things. All these other things we've been talking about that. That created that. But absolutely was political. Very political.

John Dehlin [01:45:37] It's probably. And I know Rebecca's next, it's probably fair to say that given how the church wasn't forthcoming about polygamy for a long, long time, that it wasn't beyond top church, more LDS church leaders to deceive the government.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:45:50] Right, of course.

John Dehlin [01:45:51] And to cover things up.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:45:52] Oh, of course. I mean, one of the other I write about really inspiring, happy topics in Mormon history. The other topic I'm a expert on is post manifesto polygamy. So absolutely. The church was. It was trying to hide the truth about his practice of polygamy.

Rebecca [01:46:08] Sure.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:46:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:46:10] So that could have been the case here, but historians have to rely on the evidence, not speculation.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:46:14] Well, no, I think definitely that there was church cover. They didn't want this known in the, you know, broader story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not something you're. You're proud of that your church participates

John Dehlin [01:46:26] in and you don't want to be destroyed as a nation, as a state.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:46:29] Right, exactly. You know, and if you think again of the letters Day Saints having violently been driven from Missouri and Illinois in just the prior decades, just recently, that would be like in the 2010s for us, something traumatic happening. They were at fear for their very existence.

John Dehlin [01:46:44] Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:46:45] And there were people who investigated the crime, including some of the army men and so forth, that say, we need to just wipe these people off the face of the earth. Literally, they're saying, wipe these people off.

John Dehlin [01:46:56] Gentiles.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:46:56] Gentiles seen that genocide. They're talking about just wiping ladders. So there was True fear for their very existence. Now it's 165 years later. There's not that concern anymore. Mormonism is here to stay, so it's not the threat that it once was. Yeah, Yeah.

The Memorial Site and Preservation Efforts

Rebecca [01:47:13] I think it'd be interesting perhaps to talk about the site. I know you don't have much time. Like I said, we visited several times. A lot of people, I think, sometimes feel okay, the church preserved the site to preserve their narrative. That's one of the criticisms, right? The signage. When you do go there, the signage is a little vague. I mean, when I went there, we were zooming, a book club meeting. I had camera equipment with me. So people thought somehow I knew. So people that were visiting, they're like, what happened here? And they're standing in front of a plaque and a sign. They really could not tell. So there's this sense perhaps, that the preservation also has an ulterior motive of controlling the narrative a little more. But then again, it is one wonderful that the site is being preserved. So maybe talk about. Maybe people don't know exactly what's happened at the site. A brief history of preservation and narrative. Maybe.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:48:02] How much time do we have?

Rebecca [01:48:03] I know. That's what I say. We have a couple snacks.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:48:05] I know very important topics,

John Dehlin [01:48:09] unless you can extend. But we have. If we get you out at a hard stop, we got like four minutes.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:48:14] But, no, this is very important, and it's a great question. So. So the monument at the Mountain Meadows was first created in 1859 by U.S. army. They gathered up the remains of the victims that were scattered throughout the valley and created a large monument which is at the spot where that monument is today. In 1859, it was destroyed a couple times. We could go. That's a whole other story. But by Juanita Brooks's time, like, later in her life, it's just fallen into disrepair because it's just kind of a tumble of stones. And eventually the stones fall apart if they're not cemented together. And so it just kind of fell in disrepair. It was difficult to get. To make a long story short, once a descendant of a victim and a descendant of a perpetrator happened to meet up there and said, we want to come together in a spirit of reconciliation and make a better. And another monument. And so it's called Dance Hill Hill. Working with the US Forest Service, they built a monument. We went up there together when we did a tour together, and there's a monument with the names of those known to have been killed in the Mountain Meadows at the Time and the two groups working with the state of Utah said, we don't want to lay any blame here because we don't really know what happened. So we're just going to list the names of the people and then put it in the passive. Well, bad things happen in the passive.

John Dehlin [01:49:44] Mistakes were made, but not by me.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:49:46] So that was 1990. So again, I feel like that monument, though, now is historical because it kind of shows how, okay, we're going to acknowledge something happened here. We're going to acknowledge that people died here, but we're not going to say what happened, which was kind of the mindset in 1990. So gradually there's more and more information now. So recently more signs have been. More signs have been put up by the federal government explaining more about what happened and so forth. The other additional granite markers that have been put up were written by descendants groups, descendants of the victims and put up. Yeah, I certainly. It's an interesting debate whether the church, the church owns the land, though it is a national historic landmark status. So the church is controlled by the federal government. What it can and cannot do there. So in other words, it's permanently preserved. Okay. There is a debate that whether or not the church should not own it anymore and it should be a national monument, which would mean the federal government would run it and the church would have no say in anything that happens there. So again, if that happens, then the churches, the church loses the opportunity to have a voice in the story that's told there. So there's that debate. That's true. Absolutely. My thing personally is I just want to see the mountain meadows preserved and taken well care of. Right. If the government takes over, we know that the federal government doesn't have necessarily the funding that the church has put into protecting this land. So it's an interesting debate. I'm not sure what they, the, what the. The right answer is, but, yeah, that's certainly a debate. It's ongoing.

The Reconciliation Quilt and Healing Efforts

Rebecca [01:51:31] Do you have one second to talk about the quilt? It's such a positive thing to end on if we only have a few minutes. This is a great story, John. You'll love this.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:51:39] So, okay, so this was back before I knew I was a descendant of a perpetrator. And when I've talked about reconciliation efforts, I was involved in one of those was I was talking to Diane Fancher, who is a descendant, and she just said, you know, if we bring all of our. We were talking about how wonderful it was the, the reconciliation that was starting to take place, and she was staying at Our home. And she said, our lives are like threads, and if we bring all of our threads together, we can make a beautiful quilt. And then I lay awake thinking about that one night, and I thought, what if we literally made two quilts, one for Arkansas and one for Utah? And I decided to run with it. I reached out to my aunt Anna Rolap, who was a professional quilter, and we designed this gorgeous quilt. And I rounded up folks who were descendants of victims and perpetrators and asked them to share any message they wanted on a square and that we would incorporate them into these two quilts. And so we made those two. Two quilts. They're gorgeous. One is in the Carol county courthouse, and the other is in the old county courthouse. It's the Washington County Museum is what it's named now today, but it's in St. George. It's open to the public. If you go upstairs, you can see this quilt. And there are 36 quilt squares, half made by descendants of perpetrators, half made by descendants of victims or just members of the church. Rick Turley made a square. Marlon Jensen made a square. I made a square. What's interesting about the second quilt is I had finished writing my embroidery, my thought, when I found out I was a descendant of a perpetrator. And so I quickly added, and I squished it in between one of the lines, descendant of William S. Holly. So you can see that if you visit the St. George quilt.

Rebecca [01:53:33] Yeah, I've seen your quilt. It's amazing, and it's so powerful. Like I said, we took some book club group there. Some of them had to literally leave the room just looking at the quilt, because one thing that's so powerfully visual about it is that each family is represented by a vine. And the children that were left alive are little rosebuds with their names. But also on the vine are the leaves of the family members that were killed. So it absolutely. Here's two little rosebuds. Those are children that were under eight that lived. But here's, you know, 10 leaves of family members that were killed. And when you see that going all the way around the quilt, it's a very powerful visual image of exactly what happened. So.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:54:15] And if anyone wants to see images of the quilt, they can just Google Mountain Meadows Massacre Reconciliation Quilts. You can. You can find pictures of them. I also wanted to share. So a lot of times people come up to me after I speak and say, I want to say I'm sorry. How do I express my sorrow to a descendant of a. Of. Of a victim? I set up a gmail account. It's. Mmm as in Mountain Meadows Massacre, reconciliationmail.com. if you send any message that you want to share there, I will make sure that I share that with descendants of victims.

John Dehlin [01:54:51] Beautiful couple. Super micro questions. Has any. Have any reparations ever been offered or paid that you're aware of?

Descendants' Wishes and Ongoing Legacy

Barbara Jones Brown [01:54:58] No. Descendants of victims always say, we don't want. It's not about money for us. What they want, again, is the. The land protected. And a lot of money has been spent to preserve and protect and purchase that land from local ranchers.

John Dehlin [01:55:12] Okay. They're. Landon and RFM are both sort of wondering. Number one. Would. Would. Is would you welcome a book about the Mountain Meadows Massacre written by never Mormons historians?

Rebecca [01:55:27] Of course.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:55:28] Absolutely. 100%.

John Dehlin [01:55:29] And then the more books, the better. And then would the same records that were available to y' all likely be available to never Mormon historians?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:55:39] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [01:55:39] Okay.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:55:40] Yeah. And if anyone wants to come see me and I'll. I'll help you. I'll show you stuff. Yeah. The more. The more people write about it and spread the word about it, the better. Absolutely.

Closing Reflections and Donor Appreciation

John Dehlin [01:55:49] Oh, yeah. Well, I think you've maybe understated your role in helping bring both insight but also reconciliation. So I just want to personally knowing a little bit about that story. I just want to, on behalf of my audience and people who care about our people, I want to personally thank you for what you've done. Navigating a very difficult thing, but producing books that absolutely no one can question, that your books move the narrative forward in very positive ways. To you, Ann. Richard.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:56:27] Thank you, John. That means a lot to me. It means a lot when people say that because it has been my life's mission. So thank you.

John Dehlin [01:56:38] Yeah. Our pleasure. Thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca [01:56:42] Yep. Barbara's amazing. And Mountain Meadows Massacre matters. It matters today and it's worth looking into. And Barbara has done incredible work that lets us all learn things. It's helped me reconcile things about my own ancestor that I never really thought I'd be more at peace. I'm not completely at peace, but much more at peace, which is wonderful. So just thank you, John, again, for letting me be on Remind everybody, pick up Sasha Sagan's book. And if you haven't, if you have not paused this video and ordered vengeance of mine, for heaven's sakes, do it. This is incredible book.

John Dehlin [01:57:13] And we're gonna nag the author of the Romney book.

Rebecca [01:57:16] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:57:16] What's his name again?

Rebecca [01:57:19] If anyone has a connection, let's do

John Dehlin [01:57:21] it until he comes back.

Rebecca [01:57:22] I Think we could get Mitt Romney on?

John Dehlin [01:57:24] Yeah, we're gonna try to get David McCready of How Minds Change, I have to answer this kid. Freshie writes, john should stop with the hair dye. I am a freak of nature. I've never dyed my hair ever once in my life. But for some reason. And I have a gray goatee, but my hair is less gray.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:57:40] My husband's the same way. My husband's the same way. He's always had dark hair. And then his last goatee, he grew out, it was white. So I said, oh, shave that thing off.

Rebecca [01:57:48] Matt.

John Dehlin [01:57:50] If you want to give a shout out to Signature Books and how people can support it, please freaking buy this book right now. Go buy Vengeance is Mine. Buy through Benchmark if you can, or just through Amazon or wherever books are sold. You can buy it in audio format, which I recommend.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:58:06] Deseret Books. Deseret Book.

John Dehlin [01:58:08] Oh, wow. The. That's amazing.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:58:09] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:58:09] Who can claim that?

Barbara Jones Brown [01:58:10] And Barnes and Noble. But yeah, try and support a local person. But if not, it's available on Amazon.

John Dehlin [01:58:15] And then if people want to support Signature Books.

Barbara Jones Brown [01:58:18] Oh, sure. So I'm the director of Signature Books and check us out signaturebooks.com we do fantastic books. Our latest one we just did was Sarah Patterson, September 6th and the struggle for the Soul of Mormonism. Our next big one coming out is D. Michael Quinn's memoir called Chosen Path that's coming out December 18th. I'd love to come on and talk about that one as well.

John Dehlin [01:58:38] Absolutely. And check out Mormonish podcast with Rebecca and Landon.

Rebecca [01:58:45] Awesome.

John Dehlin [01:58:45] And then just finally, we have lost a lot of donors over the past months and year or two, and we're only able to continue providing these services with your support. So if you are not current, if you are a donor, thank you. We couldn't do this without you. Our sincere thanks. If you're not a supporter of Mormon Stories and the Oba Stories foundation and you want to see this type of content continue, if you want to pay it forward for others, all you got to do is go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, become a monthly donor, and we will do our best to keep providing this content. Weirdly, we've had a significant drop in donations and we've had our best year ever by an order of magnitude. So I don't know exactly. Well, I have some thoughts on why that is. But regardless, please support us if you can. And again, Barbara, you're the best. Rebecca, you're the best. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. We'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody.

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