How Juanita Brooks' history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre changed Mormon views of the past
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An illustration of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Image: Getty Images
Seventy-five years ago this month, a new book drastically changed how Latter-day Saints viewed their own history: Juanita Brooks' "The Mountain Meadows Massacre."
- This is Old News, where we recount the history of Utah history.
Why it mattered: It was the first historical work that offered convincing evidence that the Mormon Militia had slain 120 California-bound settlers in a 19th-century attack long blamed primarily on Indigenous people in southern Utah.
Catch up quick: A wagon train of about 140 settlers from Arkansas arrived in Utah in 1857, just as a wave of panic and hostility was sweeping through the territory.
- Brigham Young had declared martial law and warned Mormon pioneers of an imminent invasion by federal troops bent on snuffing out his emerging theocracy.
- Settlers near Cedar City, wearing Indigenous costumes and joined by an unknown number of neighboring Paiute people, attacked and surrounded the Arkansas party.
- Worried their victims may have recognized some of them as white Mormons, the militia promised the party safe passage — and then massacred them all, save 17 children who were deemed too young to inform on the attackers.
By the numbers: It was the nation's deadliest act of domestic terrorism until at least the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921.
The intrigue: Federal investigators at the time raised suspicions that local church leaders were behind the attack, but only one was tried and convicted. At his execution, he claimed he was a mere scapegoat — an allegation Brooks affirmed, noting church leaders couldn't "acquit him without assuming a part of the responsibility themselves."
- For the next century and a half, church and historical accounts mostly assigned responsibility to the Paiute.
Context: When Brooks' book was published in November 1950, Mormonism was barely on nonmember historians' radar — and members generally learned only flattering narratives of the faith's past.
- "History became a form of uncanonized scripture; challenging accepted history was an assault on both God's word and church leaders' testimony," historian Richard Saunders wrote in 2019.
Zoom in: Brooks found letters, diaries and church records that showed the Mormon militia's true culpability.
- "The book helped create a new climate of openness in Mormon studies," three BYU historians wrote in 2001.
Zoom out: In 2007, a church leader at an anniversary ceremony expressed "profound regret" for the attack, but a spokesperson said the statement didn't amount to an apology.
- The statement focused on "local leaders" and held Young blameless, even though Brooks and other historians have accused him of inflammatory rhetoric and interfering with investigations.
- The leader, Henry B. Eyring, also acknowledged the Paiute "have unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the massacre."
The other side: Utah public school textbooks continued to assign blame largely to the Paiute until at least 1985, per a study at USU.