Mountain Meadows book called a vehicle for healing

By Megan Wiseman

October 29, 2008 | The book Massacre at Mountain Meadows is allowing descendants of the 1857 massacre's victims' families to finally be able to reach a point where they can heal, said Richard Turley, one of the book's three authors.

Turley, along with the other two authors, Glen Leonard and Ronald Walker, gave a lecture and participated in a discussion with USU students and Cache Valley community members Monday afternoon. All three authors gave short lectures on aspects of the book and then answered questions.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre is one of the darkest chapters in the history of Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A group of Midwestern pioneers en route to the West Coast was slaughtered in southwestern Utah for reasons that still are not entirely clear.

Phillip Barlow, a professor in USU's religious studies department, introduced the authors and the book by saying that the LDS church has responded positively to the project. In the beginning the authors planned on having the book as their own project with their own reactions to the event, separate from the church. But as the book started unfolding, Walker explained that they took the manuscript to church leaders to get support for research, The church leaders said the book was still the authors' own project but they would receive full cooperation from the church.

Walker explained that originally they planned to spend only a couple of months on the book, but after starting in 2001 they embarked on seven years of heavy research and emotionally draining work.

"In my journal I wrote, 'The older I become the more distasteful terror and bloodshed is.' And then I had to work in these subjects for seven long years," said Walker.

Walker talked about Andrew Jenson, a church historian, who collected personal recollections from people involved with the massacre. Walker said that Jenson wrote in his diary about how unpleasant it was getting the accounts of people at the massacre -- the subject was so intense that Jenson would come home at night feeling tired from the stories he had heard that day.

The actual events in the book were written and discussed by Turley, who worked hard to create a timeline of the events in the days previous to the massacre, the massacre itself and what happened in the following days after the bloodshed. Turley explained how violence is a part of U.S. history and that the violence in the 19th century is a lot different then the violence of today. In the 19th century violence was carried out by the prominent people, where as today most of those who cause violence are on the fringe of society and don't hold much social prominence.

Turley went through the specific events of the mountain meadows massacre and said that those who carried out the massacre were ordinary individuals who found themselves in unfavorable circumstances. Turley stressed that most of the men involved were people that if you took away those two weeks in 1857, they would have led exemplary lives but instead they found themselves in a situation where small events snowballed into a mass murder that no one wanted to take blame for.

"There is in human beings a great tendency to pass the moral buck up the line," said Turley. Instead of criticizing the decisions made by these men, Turley suggested that we look at the reasons behind the circumstances of the event and ask ourselves "What would I have done in that situation?"

Leonard expanded on this topic by looking at why good people do things that they normally wouldn't even consider. He said that one of the main reasons is because the Saints' ideals failed. Things were exaggerated and misrepresented towards the immigrants and they were seen as evil. Once the saints acted out of jealousy, hate and worry, the deed was already done and their justifications seemed very flimsy, said Leonard. By slowly giving in to small emotions such as pride, Leonard said that things got out of control and were hard to stop because of the rationalizations that were made.

At the end the lecture was opened up for questions from the audience ranging from anything about the book to general questions about the massacre. One audience member asked if there were any recollections from non-LDS citizens in Cedar City at the time. Walker explained that there isn't much there concerning the Indian voice and the non-LDS voice and that they wished there was more. The very few sources that the authors found concerning these two voices were heavily looked over and used very wisely but they still with that there was more sources that could have been used.

Another important point that the authors touched on during the question and answer section was how descendants from not only the immigrants but also from the men who participated in the massacre can begin to move on. Walker said that the granddaughter of Haight, the stake president during the time and also one of the men who pushed for the killings to happen, wanted to know how she could come to terms with being a descendant of this man. Walker said that he told her to look at the bigger picture and that all of us have the capacity to do wrong when we are placed in certain circumstances. He said that one of the most important messages from the book is that instead of criticizing we need to be tolerant and understanding and realize why these men acted in this manner.

MS
MS