Utah Department of Heritage and Arts

In 2008 the book Massacre at Mountain Meadows, authored by historians Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, came out to much public and academic acclaim. Fifteen years later, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown have produced a follow-up work that addresses an equally complex story about the massacre's aftermath.This book is truly magisterial in its careful and detailed telling of the myriad factors and circumstances concerning the massacre's twenty-plus-year aftermath, which closed with the execution of only one of the perpetrators, John D. Lee, in 1877. Turley and Brown also tell of the not-so-pretty last years and unpleasant deaths of the other massacre leaders, who evaded prosecution and punishment.One should not assume that reading the first book is required to fully appreciate this new volume, as the authors have included a series of chapters recapping the massacre story. If you are one of those who have followed the many histories published in the last twenty-five years about the massacre, do not be tempted to skip these early chapters, as you will miss some stunning new discoveries and insights regarding why the Baker-Fancher party was harassed in the first place. The book is about the aftermath, but it has new insights regarding the massacre.By way of forty-seven small and concise chapters, Turley and Brown methodically explain twenty-plus years of half-truths, denials, cover-ups, political intrigue, investigations, obstructions of justice, indictments, trials, and the eventual execution of John D. Lee. Finally, the authors tell the story of a plume of intergenerational trauma caused by the massacre. This includes more than 120 victims; the seventeen surviving children, who were eventually identified and returned to their next of kin; the extended families of the massacred, who to this day have very strong family memorial organizations; the Paiute men who were drawn into events by Mormon settler alliances; and finally, the scores of young Mormon militiamen who lived out their lives essentially silenced and frequently hidden by their families and communities. These chapters make this book well worth the reading.Regarding Lee's trial records, the authors carefully inspect primary sources that had been, for over a century, perfunctorily cited but not critically examined. The authors discovered that many of these oft-cited sources were altered or incomplete. For instance, John D. Lee's supposed “confessions” had been doctored by his lawyer. The trial transcripts were also doctored for purposes other than the trial. Some portions were deleted, and other portions were never transcribed. Due to these new or mishandled source materials, Richard Turley coedited, along with Janiece L. Johnson and LaJean Purcell Carruth, a complete set of images and transcriptions of all Mountain Meadows Massacre legal records in 2017, entitled Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers (University of Oklahoma Press). Vengeance Is Mine uses the fully rendered sources.Vengeance Is Mine addresses a one-and-a-half-century-long misinformation campaign that it was the “Indians” who were responsible for the massacre. The book instead makes abundantly clear it was just the opposite—it was perpetrated entirely by white settlers, who, after establishing alliances, drew in Native Americans, various Paiute bands, to assist and to divide up the spoils. From the beginning, according to Brown and Turley, those who carried out the crime intended to place the blame entirely on their Paiute neighbors.Turley and Brown do make clear that once John D. Lee was convicted and executed for his proven crimes, it was easy for the greater Utah society, and even the other participants in the crime, to say that the horrendous deed was done only by Lee, aided by the Paiute men. This deceitful story became, during the ensuing 166 years, something of a society-wide expression of cognitive dissonance, allowing the story of Lee and Native Americans as the perpetrators to stand as the prevailing public explanation. Brown and Turley's book explodes these myths and seeks to fully tell the truth. The denial, “transfer of blame,” and “blame the victim” narratives continued to prevail, even after the historian Juanita Brooks published the first definitive, evidence-based study that exposed white settler involvement in Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1950. (Turley and Brown dedicate this volume to Brooks.)Finally, it must be stated that Turley and Brown completed in this book the kind of scholarship that could scarcely be dreamt of, let alone produced, even a generation ago. It is well done “hard history,” and for Utah, it is a much-needed healing history.