American Primeval & The Mountain Meadows Massacre

With the release of the trailer for the forthcoming American Primeval, my belief that it would center around the Mountain Meadows Massacre is confirmed. That dark deed occurred on September 7-11, 1857, when John D. Lee led a contingent of Mormon militia in the mass murder of at least 120 members of the Baker-Fancher emigrant wagon train in the Utah Territory. Lee was the only one later convicted of this terrible deed, and was hauled out to the massacre site for his execution. At the time, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) felt itself threatened by a hostile federal government and “gentile” immigrants. We’ll delve into all that in a minute.

First, the miniseries. Holy smokes, this is looking solid. Mark L. Smith is the screenwriter — he’s the writer on The Revenant. Peter Berg is the director, and one of the executive producers worked on Narcos. Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin lead the cast.

I was mightily amused at Gilpin’s remarks about being cast in a “dream role.”

“I don’t know if I had dreamed of being in a Western before, but certainly a period piece. I think when I dreamed about it, I was thinking more like Pride and Prejudice, not, you know, people’s throats being ripped out.”

Peter Berg said:

“We wanted to try and achieve a certain level of intensity It’s not stylistic and visually appealing. It’s in your face and hard-hitting, which felt true to the time period — and certainly true to the story that we wanted to tell.”

Sons of Anarchy alum Kim Coates plays Mormon leader Brigham Young. I am very interested to see how they handle the question of Young’s complicity in the massacre…

Looks like the production is making a real effort to accurately portray the native cultures — Pauite, Shosone, Ute — of the region. Julie O’Keefe Indigenous Cultural Consultant said:

“My approach comes from an academic approach focused on authenticity. It is assumed by the majority in Hollywood that one person can answer any ‘Native American’ question. There are 574 federally recognized Tribal Nations in the U.S., so that is literally impossible. The goal for a Native consultant, even though I refer to myself as an Indigenous Cultural Consultant, is to make sure the director and all departments are provided with the accurate information so that different Tribal cultures are not borrowed or mixed together to portray some kind of a hodgepodge of cultures that have nothing to do with the Tribe being portrayed. Imagine if you buried the Pope in lederhosen with a Buddhist nun officiating Catholic rites, while everyone danced with a Union Jack flag. That is what it looks like to see your culture misrepresented.”

Still haven’t yet seen a Mississippi Rifle, but we’ll get Beecher’s Bibles — 1853 Sharps Carbines — and an assortment of muzzleloaders. From a material culture standpoint, this looks good.

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So… The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Dark doin’s in the Utah Territory.

In 1857, a wagon train of emigrants left Arkansas, headed for California. The Baker-Fancher Train was better provisioned and stocked than most, and allegedly carried a fair amount of cash. They hit Utah Territory at a fraught moment, when the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was feeling a significant threat from the federal government, which looked askance at their efforts to establish an independent fiefdom in the West — and on the practice of polygamy. Brigham Young had declared martial law. The Mormons had been persecuted and run out of Missouri and Illinois, their leader Joseph Smith murdered by a mob, so they had a certain level of justifiable paranoia about “strangers.”

Rumors tore like wildfire through the territory: The Fancher party had poisoned a spring; they were harboring a man who had murdered a Mormon who took his wife; one of the party was packing the gun that killed Joseph Smith. Kinda crazy, but rumors take on a life of their own, especially in a population amped up on fear and loathing. (Edit: It seems that some of these rumors were not contemporary to the events; they may have been on the order of post-hoc “theories of the crime,” ie. they did the deed because they may have thought…”).

It seems that there were some actual verbal confrontations between members of the wagon train and Mormonn settlers, because the settlers were denying the train grazing and refusing to sell provisions due to the martial law decree that ordered them to stockpile in anticipation of attack.

A unit of Mormon militia styled the Nauvoo Legion recruited some Paiute Indian auxiliaries and attacked the Baker-Fancher party in a California Trail resting spot known as Mountain Meadows, in the southwest corner of the territory. The emigrants were well-armed and successfully held them off for several days. The militia had disguised themselves as Paiutes, in order that the Indians get the blame for the attack. It became clear that the disguise wasn’t holding; the folk in the wagon train knew who their attackers were. That posed a problem. If they reported this it would give federal forces a casus belli to invade the territory and overthrow them.

So… they offered the party safe passage out of the meadow if they laid down their arms and surrendered their property. The emigrants took the offer — and the militiamen and Indians fell on them, killing everyone except 17 children deemed too young to tell tales. These were “adopted.”

It was a horrific atrocity — between the initial attacks and the final killing spree, 120 men, women and older children murdered.

Questions remain to this day. Did Mormon leader Brigham Young order the massacre? He certainly didn’t shy from violence. He promoted the killing of apostates through “blood atonement.” Yet, he wrote a letter to the militia — which arrived two days after the massacre, telling them to leave the emigrants alone and let them pass. Was that genuine, or cover? Impossible to know for sure — but I tend to think that Young recognized that attacking emigrants was a bad play. He and the LDS leadership did, however, do their best to memory-hole the massacre. It’s not like they acted quickly to bring justice to the perpetrators…

The Church’s position is this:

In the early 2000s, the Church made diligent efforts to learn everything possible about the massacre. Historians in the Church History Department scoured archives throughout the United States for historical records; every Church record on the massacre was also opened to scrutiny. A resulting book published by Oxford University Press in 2008 by authors Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard concluded that while intemperate preaching about outsiders by Brigham Young, George A. Smith, and other leaders contributed to a climate of hostility, Young did not order the massacre. Rather, verbal confrontations between individuals in the wagon train and southern Utah settlers created great alarm, particularly within the context of the Utah War and other adversarial events. A series of tragic decisions by local Church leaders—who also held key civic and militia leadership roles in southern Utah—led to the massacre.

The Civil War delayed any justice for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It wasn’t until the 1870s that anyone was brought to trial. Militia leader John D. Lee was convicted of murder an hauled out to Mountain Meadows, sat down on his coffin, and blown away by a firing squad.

John D. Lee sitting on his coffin, moments before execution.

This is a solid summary of events from a favorite channel. You can go down a long sidetrail with podcasts — many of them from members of todays LDS Church — examining this dark moment in frontier history.