Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath

Turley (In the Hands of the Lord), former assistant historian of the Church of Latter-day Saints, and Jones Brown, director of Signature Books, deliver a meticulous history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and its decades-long consequences. In September 1857, members of the Latter-day Saint community of southern Utah killed more than 100 travelers en route from Arkansas to California, sparing only 17 children. Turley and Jones Brown tease out the tensions that incited the massacre—fears of federal invasion of the territory, general animosity between the Mormon community and the state—and recount the eventual murder trial of John D. Lee in 1874. Lee and others denied any involvement and blamed local Paiutes for the murders; meanwhile, federal authorities were hampered by a lack of funds. In the end, only Lee was convicted in a complicated series of trials that aimed to disenfranchise Mormons amid rising anti-polygamy sentiment. Though sometimes bogged down by dense, dry prose, the authors draw revelatory links between local effects of the massacre and national anxieties about religion and political volatility, giving readers a comprehensive, complex understanding of the era. This should become the definitive account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and its fallout. (May)