Lessons gleaned from the Mountain Meadows Massacre

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The unmentionable odour of death

- W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

The recent commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the massacre at Mountain Meadows was perhaps the most significant marking of this tragic event since its occurrence. What made it so was that for the first time there was open and official acknowledgment that the massacre was planned, coordinated and executed by leaders and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, facts that have been denied or repressed for a century and a half.

An article in the September Ensign magazine by church historian Richard Turley Jr. acknowledges the responsibility of Latter-day Saints for the murder of 120 men, women and children, calling the massacre a "horrific crime."

At a ceremony marking the event at Mountain Meadows, LDS Apostle Henry B. Eyring expressed "profound regret for the massacre ... and for the undue and untold suffering experienced by the victims then and by their relatives to the present time." He also expressed regret "to the Paiute people who have unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the massacre."

There are many lessons that can be learned from what happened at Mountain Meadows. One of these is that, under the right circumstances, most if not all of us are capable of committing what in our more sober reflections we would consider barbaric acts.

The Milgram Experiment at Yale and the Stanford Prison Experiment both demonstrate that ordinary people are willing to inflict enormous pain on others, either because they are directed to do so by someone in authority or because they have the power to do so.

A second lesson is that blind obedience to authority often leads to tragic consequences. In an article on his experiments, Milgram comments on "the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority . . . ." While such blind obedience seldom leads to the extreme behavior seen at Mountain Meadows, we need to remind ourselves that it has that potential.

A third lesson is that attempts to deny history and suppress the truth invariably fail and that the consequences of such denial and suppression are always greater than the consequences of the truth itself, no matter how painful it may be at the time. Had church and civil authorities (which in frontier Utah tended to be the same) fully investigated the murders and brought the perpetrators to justice, or had the church itself in later decades acknowledged what leaders certainly must have known about the event from its archives, the suffering of those who committed the crime, the survivors, the descendants of both, and generations of Latter-day Saints who have felt a communal guilt over the affair would have diminished long ago.

A fourth lesson, one that may be particularly relevant today, is that stereotyping and scapegoating have dangerous consequences. The polarizing, demonizing, categorical rhetoric that swirls around us is akin to that which swept up and down the Wasatch Front during those first years in the Great Basin and which surely contributed to the deaths of those innocent Arkansas pioneers and to the persistent racism of our culture connected to the Mormons' laying the blame on the heads of Native Americans for all these years.

A fifth lesson is that religious extremism often leads to the worst kind of offenses against humanity. The zeal that inspired the massacre is related to the fundamentalist religious terrorism that rages across much of the world today. Killing other people in the name of God always uncivilizes us.

The most important lesson from Mountain Meadows is that if we deny history we cannot learn from it, and if we cannot learn from history, we are likely to repeat it.

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* ROBERT A. REES has written extensively on Mormon-related issues.