Everyone knows about the events of 9/11. But few are aware that, a century and a half before, September 11 was associated with a ghastly act of violence that was similarly driven by religious zealotry and a desire to punish Americans. The events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which took place in early September 1857, and came to their horrific conclusion on the 11 September, have been called “the darkest deed of the 19th century”.
They form the conclusion of the first episode of the new big-budget western series on Netflix, American Primeval, which focuses on the battle for Utah in the mid-nineteenth century. It is a shameful incident in American history that is less known today than it should be, but the show’s muddy, bloody evocation of the darkest point in its country’s history is about as far away from the glamorisation of How The West Was Won as it’s possible to get.
The origins of the first September 11 atrocity stem from the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who was assassinated in Illinois on June 27, 1844, aged 38. The religion was one of ecstatic revelation which Smith claimed had come to him in a vision from God when he was still a teenager, and its followers were enthusiastic adherents to the so-called ‘true faith’; among its teachings was the practice of polygamy and the belief that God had revealed to Smith a set of commandments inscribed in a golden book – the Book of Mormon. Naysayers, though, viewed it as a dangerous sect, and one that could be exploited by its charismatic leaders into a personality cult.
Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a furious mob in the town of Carthage while awaiting trial on charges of treason and conspiracy, after he destroyed an independent newspaper that was critical of his leadership and religious ambitions. Opinion was divided (as it still is) as to whether Smith was a martyr for the faith he believed in or a dangerous and cynical fanatic whose propagation of polygamy was done for his own selfish and decidedly ungodly motives.
After Smith’s death, one of his deputies, Brigham Young, assumed command of the Mormon faith. Young was a wildly different character to Smith, possessed of an authoritarian streak that tipped into a dictatorial zeal. He wished to avoid any threat to his leadership, and so determined to lead his order into the Salt Lake Valley, which had originally been part of Mexico but had recently come under American control. It was a remote, barren area, a considerable way from any major settlement, and therefore easier to operate with a degree of autonomy. By the time that he arrived in Salt Lake valley in 1850, he was so powerful that he held complete sway over his followers.
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As the judge John Cradlebaugh would later remark to Congress of Young, “The mind of one man permeates the whole mass of the people, and subjects to its unrelenting tyranny the souls and bodies of all. It reigns supreme in Church and State, in morals, and even in the minutest domestic and social arrangements. Brigham’s house is at once tabernacle, capital, and harem; and Brigham himself is king, priest, lawgiver, and chief polygamist.”
Young himself refused to acknowledge any authority other than the Almighty’s, declaring that “Any President of the United States who lifts his finger against these people shall die an untimely death and go to hell!” Yet amidst his fine words and threats, it was also the case that Utah was plagued by drought and insect infestations, which led to crops failing and economic collapse.
Young’s solution was to implement a scheme known as the Reformation, a back-to-basics programme of Old Testament-influenced morality; his followers were instructed to be baptised anew, and, most disturbingly, to embrace a doctrine of blood atonement. Young declared that “If our neighbour wishes salvation, and it is necessary to spill his blood upon the ground in order that he be saved, spill it.” If this was unacceptable, the only other option was to leave Salt Lake immediately.
In 1857, Young’s control over his domain was such that the federal officials in Utah fled, believing that they would be killed if they failed to follow his instructions. The President at the time, James Buchanan, rattled at the potential threat to his authority, viewed Young as an insurrectionist and ordered that the army be sent to Utah to put down any uprising. This was seen by the Mormons as a declaration of war against their religion, and tensions rose ever-higher, exacerbated further by an unlikely alliance that Young now brokered with the Paiutes tribe on the principle that their mutual enemy, in the form of the United States government, was a greater threat to their continued survival than they were to one another.
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On September 1, Young explicitly asked local Indian chiefs to frustrate the path of emigrants by stealing the cattle of anyone crossing over Utah land, bound for California. The certainty that this would lead to retaliation meant that bloodshed was imminent. This is the geopolitical cauldron into which the hapless settlers of American Primeval trot.
As Young sought to strengthen his hold over his kingdom, a group of 140 emigrants, known as the Baker-Fancher party, were making their way across the country from Arkansas, bound for the West Coast. It was a long, dangerous journey, and one that they embarked upon from a desire to find a better lives for themselves and their families, rather than the religious fanaticism that Young was stoking with the Mormons at the time.
Unfortunately for them, in the febrile and paranoid atmosphere of the time – stoked by Young – false rumours began to spread that they had been involved in the death of Joseph Smith the previous decade. Young’s right-hand man John D Lee decided that “This lot of people had men amongst them that were supposed to have helped kill the prophets in the Carthage jail”, and, with the memory of the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith fresh, created near-hysteria amongst the faithful.
By the time that the Baker-Fancher group arrived in Salt Lake City on September 4, Lee consulted his fellow Mormon Isaac C Haight and decided that it was their deity’s will to kill these emigrants. Haight was a willing accomplice, announcing that “There will not be one drop of innocent blood shed, if every one in the damned pack are killed, for they are the worse lot of outlaws and ruffians that I ever saw in my life.”
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Two days later, the Baker-Fancher party arrived at the incongruously idyllic-sounding Mountain Meadows, where they made their encampment. The following morning, at the break of day, they were attacked by a coalition of Paiutes and Mormon soldiers, the Nauvoo Legion, who had disguised themselves as Paiutes so that no Mormon might be blamed for the killings that would follow. As one survivor put it, “Our party was just sitting down to a breakfast of quail and cottontail rabbits when a shot rang out from a nearby gully, and one of the children toppled over, hit by a bullet.”
The idea was to murder everyone and leave no witnesses to what would become one of the worst atrocities committed on American soil in the century, but Lee and Haight had underestimated the resilience, and the firepower, of the Baker-Fancher men and women, and so a siege began that lasted for several increasingly bloody days. Haight, fearing that the Mormons might be defeated – and thus witnesses be left to their actions – sent a desperate letter to Young asking for guidance as to what to do.
The Mormon leader sent a carefully phrased reply on 10 September, in which he wrote, “In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them until they are first notified to keep away. You must not meddle with them. The Indians we expect will do as they please but you should try and preserve good feelings with them. There are no other trains going south that I know of. If those who are there will leave, let them go in peace.” This appeared to counsel restraint, but it has also been suggested – as American Primeval does – that Young was fully aware of Haight and Lee’s actions and intentions and was merely covering himself in the event of any of the Baker-Fancher party escaping.
In the end, they would not be allowed to. After several days of inconclusive fighting, the emigrants were offered a truce, on the understanding that they would give up their weapons and travel the 35 miles back to Cedar City, then a small Utah settlement known as Fort Cedar, and avoid Mormon territory from then on. They were escorted by armed men, and once they had reached a suitable point, the Nauvoo Legion commander, Major John Higbee, shouted “Do your duty!”
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This was the signal for the massacre to begin, something that one survivor, Nancy Huff, later recalled as having been unparalleled in its viciousness. “I saw my mother shot in the forehead and fall dead. The women and children screamed and clung together. Some of the young women begged the assassins after they run out on us not to kill them, but they had no mercy on them, clubbing their guns and beating out their brains.”
One-hundred-and-twenty defenceless survivors were killed within a few moments, and their bodies stripped naked and given the most cursory of burials. The only members of the party to be spared were the youngest children, who their killers believed would not remember any of the massacre; they were taken back to Salt Lake and placed for adoption with local families.
Young’s reaction to the event was initially to declare martial law, and then to claim that the killings had been the work of the Paiutes. He briefly considered the idea that such a cowardly atrocity may not have been compatible with his deity’s plans for the Mormon faith, but soon dismissed this as an idea. “I asked the Lord if it was all right for the deed to be done, to take away the vision of the deed from my mind, and the Lord did so, and I feel first rate. It is all right. The only fear I have is from traitors.”
In the aftermath of the massacre, the confusion and obfuscation that had existed served its purpose. It was widely believed that Native Americans had been responsible, rather than true-born Americans, and so it was not as vigorously prosecuted as it might have been. Nonetheless, a scapegoat had to be found, to satisfy the public outcry that ensued, and Lee was eventually tried and executed, two decades later. As his defence attorney noted during his trial, this was as much a political decision as it was a legal one: “The Mormon Church had resolved to sacrifice Lee, discarding him as of no further use.”
Young died in 1877, with his complicity in the massacre remaining as mysterious as it does today. And successive heads of the Mormon faith have regarded the Mountain Meadows Massacre as a dark stain on their church’s activities and American itself alike, although some of the church’s members are less than impressed about Young’s presentation in the show. Christopher D Cunningham wrote in the organisation’s publication Public Square Magazine that “American Primeval is telling a fictional story about a real leader who would never do what he is being shown doing… Netflix’s choice to defame Brigham Young under the pretence of ‘fiction’ says very little about Brigham Young and Latter-day Saints in the 19th century or today.”
Whether or not its presentation of Young is fair – and in Kim Coates’s clearly villainous portrayal of him as a religious bigot, there is little room for ambiguity – the show pulls no punches when it comes to its horrors. American Primeval depicts the vicious brutality of the massacre in unflinching, hard-to-watch detail that makes a similar depiction of killing of settlers in Kevin Costner’s Horizon seem mild. Curiously, it almost soft-peddles the violence by having the entire event take place in one day rather than, as in reality, over several days and nights.
The filmmaker behind the show, actor-turned-director Peter Berg suggested that it was important to depict the “horrible crime” with as much realism as possible. As he said in a recent interview, “We wanted to capture as much as we could of the rawness, the brutality, and the immediacy of this violence. It was a mass murder that was committed by Mormons against pioneers from Arkansas. The Mormons had involved some different members of an Indian tribe and manipulated, I believe, that tribe into participating in this massacre.”
Audiences have responded positively to the show’s evocation of the timelessness of American violence. As Berg said, “One of the themes [screenwriter] Mark L Smith and I wanted to explore was man’s inherently violent nature. Certainly, if you go back to the origins of this country and start studying and documenting the history of violence committed by humans upon humans up to the present day that we’re living in today, and certainly from the origin story of America and other countries – almost all of them – we are a violent species.”
American Primeval is clear proof of this. For viewers of every political or social hue, there are parallels with contemporary events, whether it’s the Proud Boys and the January 6 rioters (now, of course, about to be pardoned and forgiven) – or, on the other extreme, the damage wrought by the Black Lives Matter protesters and those committing violence in the name of pro (or anti) Gaza demonstrations.
America is a violent country, and always has been, and Mormonism, a relatively new religion based on charisma and revelation, shares its DNA with the place where it came into being. For all the jokes about The Book of Mormon and temple garments, this unsettling and visceral reminder of man’s inhumanity to man is all too contemporary.
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