The 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre

About this episode

This episode explores the Mountain Meadows Massacre, detailing the events leading to the tragedy and its aftermath.

In September 1857, a wagon train of roughly one hundred and forty men, women, and children from Arkansas made camp in a remote valley in southwestern Utah Territory. They were headed to California. They never made it. Over the course of five days, members of the local Mormon militia and recruited Paiute warriors besieged the Fancher-Baker party at Mountain Meadows, and on September 11, under a white flag of truce, lured the emigrants into surrendering their weapons with a promise of safe escort. What followed was one of the worst mass killings in American frontier history. The men were shot at point-blank range by the militiamen walking beside them. The women and older children were attacked simultaneously. Only seventeen children survived, all under the age of seven, spared because they were deemed too young to identify the killers. This episode traces the full story from the decades of genuine persecution that drove the Latter-day Saints west, through the paranoia of the Utah War and the incendiary rhetoric of the Mormon Reformation, into the valley where faith and fear produced an atrocity that the institution then spent over a century trying to bury. We examine the five-day…

Topics covered

• mass killings
• American frontier history
• Mormon history
• Utah War
• atrocities
• persecution
• cover-up

Keywords

• Mountain Meadows Massacre
• Mormon militia
• John D. Lee
• Fancher-Baker party
• mass killings
• Utah Territory
• American history
• atrocities
• persecution
• white flag deception

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Mormon militia, Latter-day Saints

Places: Utah Territory, Mountain Meadows

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