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Within weeks of the Mountain Meadows Massacre on Sept. 11, 1857, newspapers began to report the heinous murder of 120 men, women and children on an Arkansas wagon train by Mormons and some Indian allies in southern Utah.
The Los Angeles Star published a story on Oct. 3, with the banner headline: "Rumored Massacre on the Plains." Nine days later, the San Francisco Herald wrote about the "Horrible Massacre of Emigrants."
Now these and other newspaper accounts have been collected, digitized and analyzed by historian Douglas Seefeldt at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. With the help of others at the school's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, Seefeldt has launched a new site, Mountain Meadows Massacre in Public Discourse. The site brings together newspaper stories of the massacre and a way to search through them to certain elements of the event. From these tools, it is easy to see, for example, who first reported the story of emigrants poisoning Utah wells and who repeated the story.
"I wanted to create a Web site for authentic, verifiable information and some help reading the texts," Seefeldt says. "Our site also identifies items as to whether they came from a Mormon source, an anti-Mormon source, a pro-emigrant source or a government source."
Newspapers are phase one of the project. Next the group will post accounts of the massacre in Western Americana, as well as anti-Mormon tracts and books and government documents.
"We are trying to pin something down that was fluid," says Seefeldt, who is writing a book about the massacre. "This is very much a work in progress."
The Web site Mountain Meadows Massacre in Public Discourse is at http://mountainmeadows.unl.edu/index.html