Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Will Bagley. University of Oklahoma Press, 2002, 493 pages.

American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857, by Sally Denton. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 306 pages.

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer. Doubleday, 2003, 372 pages.

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Mass Murder in Deseret

by William Grigg

When the Utah Sentencing Commission recently proposed the elimination of the firing squad as a method of executing convicted murderers, the Mormon leadership issued a terse statement declaring that it "has no objection to the elimination of the firing squad in Utah." This was necessary, reported The Associated Press, because of a:

"purported church doctrine that held that justice was not done unless a murderer's blood was shed. . . . [S]ome in Mormon-dominated Utah still believe the firing squad is necessary for religious reasons. Commission members feared that belief could hurt the chances of the proposed change [getting through] the Legislature."

"If we hadn't [asked for the Church's position]," said commission member Paul Boyden, "this probably would have been a question among some legislators and it may have not made it out of committee."

The Mormon doctrine at issue here is called "blood atonement," and it dictates that there are certain sins — including, but hardly limited to, murder — that place the offender beyond the redemptive capacity of Christ's atonement. "If these offenses are committed," wrote Joseph Fielding Smith, the tenth Mormon Church president, "the blood of Christ will not cleanse [the offenders] from their sins even though they repent. Therefore their only hope is to have their own blood shed to atone, as far as possible, in their behalf."

In his quasi-official book "Mormon Doctrine," late Mormon Apostle Bruce R. McConkie insisted — dishonestly — that "there is not one historical instance of so-called blood atonement in this dispensation" (the period since the Mormon Church was founded in 1830). However, McConkie obliquely acknowledged that Utah's preferred method of execution was inspired by the doctrine:

"This doctrine [of blood atonement] can only be practiced in its fulness [sic] in a day when the civil and ecclesiastical laws are administered in the same hands. . . . [I]t was not and could not be practiced in this dispensation, except that persons who understood its provisions could and did use their influence to get a form of capital punishment written into the laws of the various states of the union so that the blood of murderers could be shed."

During the reign of Brigham Young, the second Mormon prophet who was also Utah's first territorial governor, the Church-dominated Utah legislature embedded the doctrine into law. By permitting the Utah state government to dispense with the firing squad, the Mormon Church signaled, at the very least, that it no longer expected a doctrine that had been central to its theology to be reflected in civil law.

In "Deseret," the Mormon name for the sprawling territory they occupied and claimed during the mid-19th century, encompassing not only modern Utah but parts of several other states, condemned murderers were offered the choice of death by firing squad — which would shed their blood, albeit stingily — or decapitation by guillotine. And, pace McConkie, there is abundant evidence that blood atonement was practiced by Mormon leaders during the period of the Deseret theocracy.

Visions and Violence

Mormon history is replete with violence, with the Saints (as they refer to themselves) just as often victimizers as victims.

"Like many new faiths, nineteenth-century Mormonism had a dark side of violence and fanaticism," writes Will Bagley in "Blood of the Prophets."

"The devotion of early Latter-day Saints and their mix of politics and religion repeatedly provoked conflict with their neighbors. The Saints regarded such opposition as persecution of their righteousness, and battles with their neighbors drove them from Ohio, Illinois, and finally into Mexico in 1847. [The territory was ceded to the U.S. the following year, following the Mexican-American War.] Each new struggle generated further bitterness and zealotry, which in turn provoked new resistance and opposition. This vicious cycle inexorably fueled the fanaticism and emotions that led to Mountain Meadows."

It was at Mountain Meadows, a southern Utah oasis, that Mormon militiamen slaughtered the entire complement (save 17 small children younger than eight, who were regarded as "innocent blood" under Mormon doctrine) of a California-bound wagon train on Sept. 11, 1857. The wagon train's considerable wealth in livestock, assets, and gold was plundered, much of it being taken by Mormon leaders as "tithes." Among the atrocity's victims were several Mormon "back-outs," or apostates, who were "blood atoned" for the supposed sin of trying to flee to California.

The surviving children were adopted by Mormon families, some of them taken into the homes of the men who murdered their parents (pleas from the child survivors' relatives in Arkansas resulted in federal action to return them to their families). Despite the involvement of high-ranking Mormon leaders and a trail of evidence leading up to Brigham Young himself, only one man — John D. Lee — was tried and executed, 20 years later, for the massacre.

The massacre occurred at a time when the Deseret theocracy was girding for war with the federal government. It also immediately followed the murder, in Arkansas, of Mormon Apostle Parley P. Pratt, at the hands of the bitter, violent husband of a woman Pratt had baptized and taken as a wife in polygamous marriage. Bagley and Denton both describe, in careful detail, how Mormon leaders maneuvered the California-bound wagon train from Arkansas to the remote meadows by denying it provisions. Mormons who defied these orders were punished, some of them beaten. At the same time, Mormon pulpits resounded with apocalyptic warnings of a coming conflict with the "Gentiles," and reminders of oaths Mormons had taken in their temple to avenge the "blood of the prophets" — slain founder Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum, and now Pratt.

Notes Bagley: "It was not a happy time for outsiders to visit the settlements of Utah Territory." In fact, as he points out, the wagon train was probably doomed from the moment it entered Utah. Word quickly spread through the ranks of the Mormon lay priesthood that the train included men responsible for the lynchings of Smith, Hyrum, and Pratt. Foul rumors were put into circulation traducing the emigrants as a pack of violent degenerates. In fact, the party was composed of respectable, church-going people, led by a man descended from French Protestants, who had fled their homeland in search of religious freedom.

As the train slowly proceeded through southern Utah, Mormon Apostle George A. Smith went ahead of it, riling the residents of each Mormon settlement with speeches invoking the Saints' duty to avenge their martyrs and smite the enemies of the Church. Both Bagley and Denton contend that Young and his underlings intended to stage a phony "Indian" attack on the train in a classic example of what is called "asymmetrical warfare": the objective was to demonstrate that the Mormons controlled access to the overland trails.

Bagley records that shortly before the initial attack on Sept. 7, Young met with a group of local Indians to whom he "gave" the wagon train's cattle. The intent was to use the Indians (aided by local Mormons in disguise) as a deniable asset. This scheme comported with Mormon doctrine. As outlined in the faith's fundamental scripture, the Book of Mormon, the Indians (or "Lamanites") were descended from ancient Hebrews who colonized the Americas in 600 B.C. It was the Lamanites' prophetic destiny to ally themselves with the Mormons to overthrow the rule of the "Gentiles" and inaugurate the millennial kingdom. At the time the Arkansas wagon train appeared in Utah, the Mormons — particularly in southern Utah — were in the grip of a feverish millennial frenzy, believing that the apocalyptic final battle with the "Gentiles" was at hand.

Money Digging and Murder

Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church and "author and proprietor" of the Book of Mormon, entered local public life as a young "money-digger." A low-caliber con artist who dabbled in folk magic, Smith charged people a fee to use his supposed gift of Seership to find buried treasure, although his gift yielded no tangible payoffs.

In 1830, after a series of claimed celestial visitations, Smith published the Book of Mormon, which he described as a volume of scripture and history compiled on plates of gold by ancient Hebrew prophets living in the Americas. Smith insisted that the record had been inscribed in "Reformed Egyptian," and that he had translated it by "the gift and power of God."

The final product, however, seemed oddly familiar for a book with such exotic origins. Its text featured huge sections from the Bible (including New Testament phrases anachronistically placed in the mouths of characters said to live before the birth of Christ), and its narrative was composed in a burlesque of King James English. But it found a ready readership among spiritual seekers, and within a few years of its publication Smith presided, as "Prophet, Seer, and Revelator," over a small but growing movement with branches in Ohio and Missouri.

The Book of Mormon reflects common early 19th-century speculations about the Hebrew origins of the American Indians. From the beginning, the Mormon Church conducted missionary outreach to the Indians, seeking to "redeem" them as fellow members of "scattered Israel."

As the Mormons moved into Independence in western Missouri, further revelations pronounced by Smith designated the area as the site of a future Mormon Zion, and suggested that the local Indians would play a role in driving away the "Gentiles" — a prospect that was, understandably, less than welcome to the area's original settlers. An 1832 revelation to Smith promised that God would "consecrate the riches of the Gentiles" to the Mormons. Another divine dispatch pointedly predicted that Jackson County, Mo. — "Zion" — would "not be obtained but by purchase or by blood. . . . " Mormon settlers in Missouri soon found themselves the targets of mob violence.

In 1833, the state legislature created a Mormon refuge in Clay County, and an uneasy peace settled over the state. But within a few years, Mormon settlements began to expand beyond the county, and a militant spirit gripped the Church's leadership. On July 4, 1838, amid the pomp and bluster of a military parade, Sidney Rigdon, Smith's unbalanced second-in-command, gave a provocative speech threatening death and destruction to both Gentiles and Mormon apostates. If the Mormons were attacked by their enemies again, Rigdon bellowed with Smith's approval, "it shall be . . . a war of extermination, for we shall follow them till the last drop of blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us."

Shortly before Rigdon's speech, a secretive Mormon paramilitary organization called the Danites had been created, its members bound by blood oaths and taught to recognize each other by the use of secret signs. Organized as an elite praetorian guard within a larger Mormon militia, the Danite band "developed an infamous reputation for its intimidation of Mormon dissenters and its warfare against anti-Mormon militia units," in the words of Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn.

Members of the Danite order played a central role in an August 1838 riot in Gallatin County, Mo. After a gang of anti-Mormons forbade a Mormon to cast a ballot, the rejected voter made the "Danite sign of distress." A melee soon erupted, with the antagonists beating each other with four-foot-long oaken clubs. The Mormons got the better of that brawl. Shortly thereafter Smith asserted publicly his readiness to propagate his religion by the sword.

An October 1838 ambush of Missouri militiamen by Mormon guerrillas at Crooked River prompted Governor Lilburn Boggs to issue an order calling for the Mormons to be "exterminated or driven from the state." Those words had a horrifying resonance when, a few days later, an anti-Mormon mob murdered 17 Mormon men and boys — including a 9-year-old child — at Haun's Mill, a small outlying settlement. The "Haun's Mill Massacre," writes Sally Denton, became "a rationale and justification for future vengeance and bloodshed — the undeniable evidence of the persecution so central to the growing faith."

Driven from Missouri, the Mormons were welcomed in Illinois as refugees, and they settled in a swampy riverside community called Commerce, which Smith renamed Nauvoo. The Mormon metropolis soon became a self-contained city-state, with all of its civic powers residing in the hands of Smith — Prophet of the Church, mayor of the city, commander-in-chief of the Nauvoo Legion, and the land baron who controlled all real estate in the city.

Since his days as a money-digger, Smith had frequently been in court, and his prophetic exploits since then had created a lengthy list of aggrieved creditors. Missouri officials also sought to extradite him for various charges arising from the 1838 "Mormon War." Nauvoo's eccentric municipal laws made it all but impossible to extradite Smith, and the Mormon prophet controlled the courts within his realm.

Smith unveiled the doctrine of blood atonement in the same revelation officially inaugurating the practice of polygamy, also known as "plural" or "celestial" marriage. Canonized as section 132 of the "Doctrine and Covenants" (one of four volumes regarded by Mormons as scripture, the other three being the Bible, Book of Mormon, and "Pearl of Great Price"), the document quotes the Lord as conferring on Smith the power to "seal" a man to as many "virgins" as he desired. This conferral occurred somewhat tardily; Smith (as even Mormon historians now admit) began to practice "plural marriage" more than a decade prior to receiving the "revelation" authorizing it. Many of his "plural wives" were teenagers — some as young as 14 — who had been told that by marrying Smith they were guaranteeing their family's salvation.

Those who enter into the covenant of "celestial and plural marriage" are assured of exaltation to godhood even if they "commit any sin or transgression . . . whatever, and all manner of blasphemies" — as long as they "commit no murder wherein they shed innocent blood. . . . " But there is a catch for those under the covenant who sin in such manner: to be redeemed, they must be "destroyed in the flesh, and . . . be delivered unto the buffetings of Satan unto the day of redemption, saith the Lord God."

Some highly placed members of the Mormon elite became disaffected by Smith's philandering, alarmed over his growing political ambitions (illustrated by his bid for the presidency), and appalled by the violence that invariably accompanied his designs.

In the summer of 1844, a group of dissidents published its concerns in a newspaper entitled the Nauvoo Expositor. Smith responded by having the city council decree that the paper was a "public nuisance" and order its suppression. The paper's office was sacked, the printing press was destroyed, and most of the paper's first and only run was collected and burned.

This riot staged under the color of municipal authority led to the arrest of Smith, his brother Hyrum, and two other Mormon leaders. They were incarcerated in Carthage, Ill. awaiting trial when an anti-Mormon mob attacked the jail, shooting Smith and Hyrum to death and seriously wounding future Mormon Prophet John Taylor.

The murder of Smith is central to what Will Bagley calls the "myth of persecuted innocence." It was also memorialized in the "Oath of Vengeance" taken by Mormons undergoing the temple "endowment" ritual, the quasi-Masonic initiation rite administered in the Nauvoo Temple, and later, after the Mormon hijra to the Rocky Mountains, in temples built in St. George and Salt Lake City.

In "Under the Banner of Heaven," Jon Krakauer summarizes:

"The oath required Mormons to pledge, 'I will pray, and never cease to pray, and never cease to importune high heaven to avenge the blood of the Prophets on this nation, and I will teach this to my children, and my children's children unto the third and fourth generations.'"

This oath, Krakauer explains, was recited by every Mormon participating in the standard temple ritual until 1927, when it was removed from the endowment ceremony due to outside pressure. News of the oath had leaked to the press, causing an uproar over its treasonous implications.

The "Reformation"

Thus for nearly the entire first century of the religion's existence — beginning with the Missouri-era threats to redeem "Zion" by bloodshed — faithful Mormons were marinated in hatred toward "Gentiles" and taught the redemptive power of sanctified violence. In the early 1850s, the sense of besetting persecution by unbelievers so central to the Mormons' communal identity became outright paranoia after Mormon leaders unveiled the previously disavowed practice of polygamy. The nascent Republican Party identified polygamy and slavery as "twin relics of barbarism" and declared war on both.

Like despots both ancient and modern, Brigham Young eagerly seized on this external threat to consolidate his power. He also ramped up Mormon recruitment efforts in Great Britain and Scandinavia (where Mormon missionaries carefully concealed the doctrine of polygamy) as a way of building up his kingdom. To cut down on the time and expense involved in bringing new Mormons to "Zion," Young ordered the construction of handcarts — rickshaw-like vehicles used to carry the pilgrims and their possessions across the plains.

The handcart initiative led to disaster in late 1856 as two companies of Mormon immigrants (known as the Martin and Willie companies), promised by Mormon leaders that God would hold back the winter snows, were caught in an abnormally early and severe blizzard. More than 200 men, women, and children died, making the Martin/Willie debacle "the worst disaster in the history of America's overland trails," recalls Bagley.

Despite the fact that the handcart disaster was a direct outgrowth of Young's "inspired" immigration scheme, "Mormon leaders refused to shoulder any blame for the catastrophe," Bagley continues. Jedediah Grant, high-ranking first counselor in the Mormon Church presidency, "laid the blame on the victims. . . . [He] blamed the death and suffering of the handcart Saints on 'the same disobedience and sinfulness that had induced spiritual sleepiness among the people already in Zion.'"

For several months prior to the handcart tragedy, Grant had presided over an orgy of fanaticism called the "Reformation," which foreshadowed — on a much smaller scale — the purgative violence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In Mormon settlements throughout Utah, Young, Grant, and their underlings excoriated the Saints for their hidden sins and unblushingly advocated blood atonement as the means of cleansing the Mormon realm of apostasy and corruption.

"We have those among us," announced Grant in early 1856, "that are full of all manner of abominations, those who need to have their blood shed, for water will not do, their sins are of too deep a dye." Mormon priesthood leaders, he insisted, had a "right to kill a sinner to save him, when he commits those crimes that can only be atoned for by shedding his blood. . . . We would not kill a man, of course, except to save him."

In an 1857 sermon, Young insisted that "holy murder" (as it was mockingly characterized by Mormonism's critics) was actually the distillate of Christian charity. Claiming to know hundreds of people who could have been saved "if their lives had been taken and their blood spilled on the ground as a smoking incense to the Almighty," Young asked his followers if they would "love [such a] man or woman well enough to shed their blood?" Grant advised the sinners among the Saints to petition Young "to appoint a committee to attend to their case; and then let a place be selected, and let that committee shed their blood."

Among the Utahans who drank deeply of the blood-drenched doctrines of the Reformation was Danite John D. Lee. Bagley notes that Lee "linked blood atonement to obedience and wrote that during the Reformation everyone in Utah believed in it." Lee would later write, "It was taught by leaders and believed by the people that the Priesthood were inspired and could not give a wrong order." A resident of southern Utah, which was on fire with the Reformation spirit, Lee would be the central figure in the single most horrifying act of religious violence in American history.

In his "Confessions," written as he awaited execution in 1877, Lee described his sentiments as he helped carry out the Massacre:

"My faith in the godliness of my leaders was such that it forced me to think that I was not sufficiently spiritual to act the important part I was commanded to perform. My hesitation was only momentary. Then feeling that duty compelled obedience to orders, I laid aside my weakness and my humanity, and became an instrument in the hands of my superiors and my leaders."

Lee's anguished reflections, committed to paper after his leaders had made him the scapegoat for the Massacre, bridge the gulf between ancient acts of tribal and religious fanaticism and the systematized butchery of modern totalitarian states. Every large-scale enterprise in modern political murder ultimately depends on the active participation of individual men willing to become "an instrument in the hands of . . . superiors and leaders."

The Retreating Tide "Historians of the LDS faith often explain Mountain Meadows as an example of frontier violence," writes Bagley.

"Yet the endorsement of such actions by a ruling elite made frontier violence in the Mormon West fundamentally different from [common] vigilantism and hooliganism. . . . Today the religion has abandoned its support of 'holy murder' and virtually every practice — polygamy, theocracy, blood atonement, consecration, communalism, millennialism — that made it so provocative in the nineteenth century. Doctrines such as belief in unquestioned obedience to the Lord's anointed persist, but the 'old-time religion' described [in 'Blood of the Prophets'] . . . has little relation to today's LDS church, which for a century has been firmly committed to becoming no more controversial than Methodism.

But as the tide of Mormon theocracy retreated, it left isolated puddles of the "old-time religion" throughout the intermountain West. Mormon fundamentalism, whose adherents remain committed to the pure, uncut "restored gospel" as taught by Smith and Young, are examined by Krakauer in "Under the Banner of Heaven."

Krakauer initially wanted to write a book examining the career of Mark Hoffman, who is serving a life sentence for murdering two people in 1985. A sociopath who was also a gifted forger, Hoffman — who was raised in a devout Mormon home, and served a mission for the Church — lost his faith as a result of studying the Church's unexpurgated history, which the ruling hierarchy seeks diligently to suppress.

Hoffman recognized that this desire to control access to history made the Mormon hierarchy vulnerable, and he devised a cunning scheme: he forged a series of "ancient" manuscripts documenting Mormonism's origins in folk magic and occultism, and used the spurious documents to extort large payments from the Church. The eagerness with which Mormon leaders, particularly Gordon B. Hinckley (since elevated to the post of "Prophet, Seer, and Revelator"), snapped up and salted away Hoffman's forgeries offered eloquent testimony of the Church's unease with its origins, and the fragility of its official historical narrative.

As his credit became overextended and his schemes began to unravel, Hoffman murdered two people with homemade parcel bombs, and nearly killed himself when he accidentally set off a third. Hoffman murdered two people, and was prepared to murder at least one more, simply as a diversion to buy time from his creditors.

Hoffman ended up in prison, where Krakauer asked to interview him. Hoffman refused, but suggested Krakauer interview his cellmate Dan Lafferty who, along with his brother Ron, murdered a young woman and her young child as an act of blood atonement. Krakauer's interviews with Lafferty were his entrée into the world of Mormon fundamentalism.

Like Hoffman, the Lafferty brothers lost their faith in mainstream Mormonism as a result of researching the Church's history. But where Hoffman became a murderous nihilist, the Laffertys chose the path of fundamentalism, as taught in a small clique calling itself the "School of the Prophets." As the brothers worked to restore primitive, polygamous Mormonism, their sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty became an impediment. In the summer of 1984, Ron reported a "revelation" instructing him to "remove" Brenda through blood atonement; her 15-month-old daughter Erica was designated a "child of perdition" and thus slated for "removal" as well. The deed was done on July 24 — "Pioneer Day," the official commemoration of the Mormon arrival in the Salt Lake Valley.

After entering Brenda's duplex in American Fork, Utah, Lafferty came upon Erica in her crib. The toddler, recognizing her uncle, smiled up into the face of her murderer. "I spoke to her for about a minute," Lafferty told Krakauer. "I told her, 'I'm not sure what this is all about, but apparently it's God's will that you leave this world; perhaps we can talk about it later.'" He then eviscerated the child with the same ten-inch boning knife he would later use to murder her mother.

Like John D. Lee, Dan Lafferty wrestled with his conscience and won, supposedly with divine assistance. "It was like someone had taken me by the hand that day and led me comfortably through everything that happened," he related to Krakauer.

"Ron had received a revelation from God that these lives were to be taken. I was the one who was supposed to do it. And if God wants something to be done, it will be done. You don't want to offend him by refusing to do His work."

The Mormon Church's de-emphasis of blood atonement, and its continuing efforts to "mainstream" its doctrines and practices, illustrate that its official definition of "God's work" has changed dramatically over the past century. But the Church continues to claim that its leaders have an exclusive franchise on divine revelation and authority, and Mormon doctrine still defines righteousness as unflinching, unqualified obedience to "The Brethren." The vestiges of blood atonement, theocracy, and similar doctrines are still present in Mormon scripture.

Mormon leaders have never honestly and candidly addressed and repudiated the Church's history of violence, nor acknowledged the Church's official complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Until Mormon leaders own up to this aspect of their heritage, it would be wise to assume that sanctified violence is encoded in the religion's doctrinal DNA.

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

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