Mountain Meadows Massacre #lds #mormon #thechurchofjesuschristoflatterdaysaints

The Mountain Meadows Massacre: What Really Happened on September 7, 1857

One hundred and sixty-seven men, women, and children were killed in southern Utah over the course of five days in September 1857. The Mountain Meadows Massacre is not a rumor, not an anti-Mormon fabrication, and not a matter of serious historical dispute. It happened. The question that still generates controversy is how far up the chain of command the orders went.

That question has never been fully answered, and the LDS Church's own shifting responses over 160 years suggest that even institutional memory finds the answer uncomfortable.

Background: The Fancher-Baker Party and the Road to California

The group attacked at Mountain Meadows was the Fancher-Baker emigrant company, traveling from Arkansas to California in the late summer of 1857. They were civilians. Farmers, families, children.

They were passing through Utah Territory during an extraordinarily tense period. The U.S. government had dispatched federal troops toward Utah, and Brigham Young had declared a form of martial law, forbidding supplies to be sold to outside parties. The territory was on a war footing, and local Mormon settlers had been primed to see outsiders as potential enemies.