Persecution, Theocracy, and Violence in Early Mormonism

Draft status.  Every quotation below was checked word for word against a source opened for it, on 8 August 2026 for the first draft and on 1 October 2026 for the sections added since.  The ledger is in quotes.md.  Four books were read only in part and one, Patrick Mason's, only through a review.  The section "What was read and what was not," just above the sources, says exactly which.

Summary

Both halves of this record are true, and an account that tells only one half is worthless.

Latter-day Saints in the 1830s and 1840s suffered violence that was organized, sustained, and in one case ordered by a state government. Vigilantes destroyed their press in Jackson County, Missouri, in July 1833 and tarred and feathered their bishop on the public square. On 27 October 1838 Governor Lilburn W. Boggs ordered that they "must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace."¹ Three days later a company of Missourians killed seventeen men and boys at Hawn's Mill, dragging children out from under a blacksmith's bellows to shoot them.² At least eight thousand people were driven out of Missouri in winter. Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered in a jail at Carthage, Illinois, in June 1844 by a mob that broke through a guard the governor had promised, and all five men tried for the killings were acquitted. In 1846 the main body of Latter-day Saints left Nauvoo in February and crossed Iowa in the cold. By the Church's own reckoning, about one in twelve died in the refugee camps in the first year.³

Latter-day Saints also organized armed bodies, drove out their own dissenters by written threat, burned and looted two Missouri towns, destroyed a newspaper press, preached that some sins required the shedding of the sinner's blood, and in September 1857 killed about one hundred twenty emigrants at Mountain Meadows after those emigrants had surrendered under a white flag.⁴ Settlers who were Latter-day Saints killed Ute and Paiute people in Utah Territory, including a group of bound and unarmed captives at Circleville in 1866. No one was prosecuted for Circleville.⁵

The honest comparative question is not "were Latter-day Saints violent." It is whether this movement was more violent than its neighbors, and whether its theology and authority structure contributed. On frequency the answer is fairly clear: Latter-day Saints were more often victims than perpetrators, and Patrick Q. Mason's observation is the right one:  historians can name nearly every instance of violence by Church members against their opponents in the movement's early decades, which by itself suggests such episodes were rare. On contribution the answer is that the structure mattered. What made Mountain Meadows possible was not a peculiar bloodthirstiness but a specific arrangement: the same men were stake president, mayor, and militia major; the territory was isolated; the population believed an army was coming to destroy them; and leaders had spent a year preaching that some people deserved to have their blood spilled. Remove the fused offices and the isolation, and the same men in the same decade probably do not kill a hundred and twenty people.  That last judgment is the least secure in the article.  Other American communities with no such fusion killed on a similar scale when they believed an enemy was among them, so the comparison supports the fear and the isolation more firmly than the fused offices.

The specific charge that Brigham Young ordered the Mountain Meadows massacre is not supported. The two Oxford University Press volumes written by Church historians with full access to Church archives, Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard's Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2008) and Turley and Barbara Jones Brown's Vengeance Is Mine (2023), conclude that Young did not order it, and his letter of 10 September 1857 told the local leaders "You must not meddle with them."⁶ That letter arrived two days after the killings.

The cover-up is a separate question with a separate answer.  The men who planned the massacre began hiding it on the field, enforced silence with threats, and blamed the Paiutes.  John D. Lee lied to Brigham Young on 29 September 1857, so Young was deceived by the cover-up at its start and was not its author.  But the false story then sat in the Church's own records for years.  Young had an apostle's written report of white involvement by August 1858 and refused Lee's story to his face in 1863.  Church hearings in 1858 punished no one, no Church court cut a participant off until 1870, and of fifty or sixty militiamen only one was ever convicted.  Whether Young's conduct in those years amounts to obstruction is not settled by what this article could read.  What remains disputed beyond that is how far his own preaching and George A. Smith's built the climate that made local men willing.

A Christian apologetics site has no standing to treat this as an exotic Mormon problem. Christians have burned dissenters, sacked cities, and blessed conquests. What is specific here is narrower and worth naming precisely: a living prophet claiming present revelation, a civil government fused with a church hierarchy, and an isolated territory in which that fusion faced no external check.

The claim being tested

Several distinct propositions are usually blurred together. They need separate verdicts.

1. Latter-day Saints suffered severe, organized, and in part state-sanctioned persecution. Established.
2. Latter-day Saints sometimes committed violence, including murder, and sometimes covered it up. Established.
3. Latter-day Saint violence was primarily defensive and retaliatory rather than aggressive. Partly true, and false in specific cases.
4. The violence was ordered from the top of the Church. Not established, and specifically contradicted in the one case where it matters most.
5. Mormon theology and authority structure made this violence more likely than it would otherwise have been. Supported, and this is the claim that survives the strongest defenses.

Proposition 1 does not answer 2, and the failure of proposition 4 does not answer 5. Most arguments on this topic fail because they settle one of these and treat the rest as though they had been settled with it.

The strongest case for the Latter-day Saint claim

Stated at its strongest, before evaluation.

The persecution was real, severe, and state-sanctioned. This is not a religious community's self-flattering memory. The order is a signed executive order of the State of Missouri, printed in a document published by order of the Missouri General Assembly in 1841. The Church's own current summary is not an overstatement: "The scope of this violence against a religious group was unprecedented in the history of the United States."³

The government refused redress at every level. Petitions to local and state authorities failed. When Joseph Smith and Elias Higbee presented their case to President Martin Van Buren on 29 November 1839, they reported six days later that Van Buren "looked upon us with a kind of half frown and said, what can I do? I can do nothing for you,— if I do any thing, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri."⁷ No Missourian was punished for Hawn's Mill. No Illinoisan was convicted for Carthage.

There is no evidence that Brigham Young ordered the Mountain Meadows massacre. His surviving instruction says the opposite. The local leaders acted after the district commander's council had twice decided against using the militia on the emigrants.  The commander refused the first request and gave way on the second only in private, apart from his council.

The Church did its own historical work, and it was serious. Historians in the Church History Department opened every Church record on the massacre, searched archives across the United States, and published the result with Oxford University Press rather than with a Church press. The 2016 Gospel Topics essay states that "some Church members participated in deplorable violence" and that "while historical context can help shed light on these acts of violence, it does not excuse them."³ In 2007, on the 150th anniversary, apostle Henry B. Eyring said at the site: "The gospel of Jesus Christ that we espouse abhors the cold-blooded killing of men, women, and children. Indeed, it advocates peace and forgiveness. What was done here long ago by members of our Church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct."³

Latter-day Saints were far more often victims than perpetrators. Patrick Q. Mason, a historian of Mormonism at Utah State University, makes the strongest single point in the defense.  It is an argument from the shape of the evidence, not from apology:  "The remarkable fact that historians can name virtually every instance of violence by church members against their opponents in the movement's early decades suggests the relative infrequence of such episodes."⁸  A category of events that can be listed one by one is a small category.  Mason's book was not obtained.  His sentence is quoted here from Frederick W. Axelgard's 2022 review in Dialogue, which prints it with its page number.

Much of what is alleged is folklore. Widely repeated stories about a standing order of Danite assassins, about supernatural punishments falling on the Carthage mob, and about poisoned springs at Mountain Meadows have all been examined and found false or unsupported. The Church's own historians say so in print.⁹

Jackson County, 1833

In July 1831 Joseph Smith dictated a revelation naming the area around Independence, Missouri, the "center place" of Zion. By the summer of 1833 about 1,200 Latter-day Saints lived in Jackson County. Their neighbors were mostly Southerners; the Saints were mostly Northerners; and an editorial in the Church's newspaper about the migration of free black converts into a slave state was read locally as an invitation to abolitionists.

On 20 July 1833 a crowd demanded that the Saints leave. When Church leaders refused, it attacked the printing office, threw the press out the window, scattered the type in the street, and tore down the walls of the building. It then tarred and feathered Edward Partridge, the Church's bishop in Missouri, and another member, Charles Allen, on the public square.¹⁰

The word "mob" understates what this was. As the Church's own history topic on vigilantism records, the July 1833 attacks "were coordinated by a committee of the county's most reputable citizens—a committee complete with chairman and secretaries."¹⁰ The committee met at the courthouse, drafted a manifesto, and pledged, in deliberate imitation of the Declaration of Independence, their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honors" to expelling their neighbors. Missouri's governor at the time, Daniel Dunklin, wrote that "public sentiment may become paramount law; and … it is useless to run counter to it."¹⁰

Violence resumed on 31 October 1833. On 4 November a fight near the Big Blue River left three dead, one of them a Latter-day Saint. The next day Colonel Thomas Pitcher called out the militia, which disarmed about 150 Church members and then stood by while their homes were vandalized. Families crossed the Missouri River into Clay County over the following weeks.

The Missouri war of 1838

By 1838 the Saints were concentrated in Caldwell County, a county the state had created for them, and were expanding into Daviess and Carroll counties over local objection.

On election day, 6 August 1838, voters at Gallatin in Daviess County blocked Latter-day Saints from the polls and a brawl followed. Afterward an armed body of Latter-day Saints, with Joseph Smith present, visited the local justice of the peace Adam Black and obtained his signature on a statement of impartiality. Black later said he had been intimidated into signing. Sampson Avard, testifying for the state three months later, described the visit as made by "110 or 200 men of us armed" and said that if Black "had not signed the paper he did, it was the common understanding and belief that he would have shared the fate of the dissenters."¹

Escalation was mutual, and the rhetoric was not one-sided. On 4 October 1838, three weeks before the state's order, Major General Samuel D. Lucas wrote to Governor Boggs from Boonville that "those base and degraded beings will be exterminated from the face of the earth," and added: "If one of the citizens of Carroll should be killed, before five days I believe that there will be from four to five thousand volunteers in the field against the Mormons, and nothing but their blood will satisfy them." Brigadier General H. G. Parks had reported on 25 September a threat "thrown out by the men of this county, that should the above measures fail, their intention is to drive the Mormons with powder and lead from this county." Parks was writing from Mill Port, in Daviess County.¹

A mob drove the Saints out of De Witt in Carroll County. Boggs's answer to their appeal was that the two sides must fight their own battles. In mid-October Latter-day Saint companies raided and burned homes and stores at Gallatin and Millport. Avard, who was present, described the Gallatin raid: Captain David W. Patten "made a rush into Gallatin, dispersing the few men there, and took the goods out of Stolling's store, and carried them to 'Diahmon, and I afterwards saw the storehouse on fire."¹ The goods, he said, were deposited in "the Lord's storehouse" and then divided among the men who took them.

At Crooked River on 25 October a Latter-day Saint rescue party collided with a state militia company. Four people died, among them the apostle David W. Patten. The Church's two current history topics give slightly different breakdowns of who died.  One says one Missourian and two Church members, the other says four killed, three of them Church members.  That small discrepancy is worth flagging rather than smoothing over.

Executive Order 44

News of Crooked River reached Jefferson City distorted. On 27 October 1838 Governor Lilburn W. Boggs wrote to Major General John B. Clark. The operative sentence reads:

The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace — their outrages are beyond all description.¹

The full order directs Clark to "hasten your operations with all possible speed," authorizes him to increase his force "to any extent you may consider necessary," and sets Generals Willock and Doniphan in motion "for the purpose of intercepting the retreat of the Mormons to the north."¹

Two qualifications belong here, and both come from the Church's own historians rather than from critics. First, in 1838 "extermination" could mean forced removal as well as killing; United States officials used "exterminating war" for campaigns aimed at either the "total expulsion" or the "total extinction" of Indian nations. Second, the massacre at Hawn's Mill three days later was carried out by vigilantes rather than by state militia, and there is no evidence that the men who did it knew the order existed.² Neither qualification makes the order defensible. A state government told its militia that a religious minority must be driven out or killed, and the militia acted on the threat.

The order was not formally rescinded until 1976, when Governor Christopher S. Bond revoked it on the ground that it "clearly contravened the rights to life, liberty, property and religious freedom" guaranteed by the constitutions of the United States and of Missouri, and expressed "deep regret for the injustice and undue suffering" it caused.¹¹

Hawn's Mill, 30 October 1838

Jacob Hawn was not a Latter-day Saint. He ran a mill on Shoal Creek about a day's walk from Far West, and a group of Saints had settled near it.

On 30 October a company of Missourians attacked. Women and most of the children fled into the woods. The men and boys took shelter in the blacksmith's shop, which had gaps between its rough log walls. The attackers surrounded it and fired through the gaps, killing men inside and men trying to surrender. Then, in the Church's own words, they "dragged out several young boys who had hidden under the blacksmith's bellows and shot them execution style."²

Seventeen were killed and twelve to fifteen wounded. The Gospel Topics essay records that the dead ranged in age "from 9 to 78."³ Amanda Barnes Smith's husband and ten-year-old son were killed there. The Church's account records that she "prayed for guidance and received personal revelation as she treated her seriously wounded 7-year-old son."²

Winter expulsion, Liberty Jail, and the failure of redress

Samuel D. Lucas laid siege to Far West on 31 October, demanded that the Saints sign over their property, arrested Joseph Smith, and held a hasty court-martial that ordered him shot the next morning. Brigadier General Alexander Doniphan, ordered to carry out the execution, refused on the ground that it was illegal. That refusal is one of the few unambiguously admirable acts by a Missouri officer in this whole record.

At least eight thousand people left Missouri that winter. Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Lyman Wight, Caleb Baldwin, and Alexander McRae were held from 1 December 1838 in the Clay County jail at Liberty, a two-story building fourteen feet by fourteen and a half, with limestone walls two feet thick and two barred windows six inches high. Joseph Smith's own description of the place, in the letter he dictated to the Church on 20 March 1839, is this: they had been "taken prisoners charged falsly with evry kind of evil and thrown into prison inclosed with strong walls surrounded with a strong guard who continually watch day and knight."¹² The spelling is his scribe's. Hearing reports of the refugees' suffering that same month he wrote, in the Church's own quotation, "O God, where art thou?" and prayed, "Remember thy suffering saints, O our God."³ That letter became sections 121, 122, and 123 of the Doctrine and Covenants. The prisoners were allowed to escape while being moved in April 1839.

The more vivid description often quoted from this jail (scant and coarse food, no privilege of cooking, sleeping on straw without blankets) comes from a later edited version of the letter rather than from the manuscript on the Joseph Smith Papers, and it is not quoted here.

Redress failed at every level. On 29 November 1839 Joseph Smith and Elias Higbee were introduced to President Van Buren in the parlor of the President's House. Their letter of 5 December 1839, the earliest surviving account, reports that Van Buren read one of their letters of introduction, "looked upon us with a kind of half frown and said, what can I do? I can do nothing for you,— if I do any thing, I shall come in contact with the whole State of Missouri."⁷

The line usually quoted, "your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you," does not appear in that letter.  The "cause is just" half first appears four years later.  Joseph Smith's Appeal to the Green Mountain Boys, a pamphlet William W. Phelps wrote on his instructions in late 1843, complains that after all the petitions the only comfort the Saints received "is, as President [Martin] Van Buren said, your cause is just, but government has no power to redress you!"¹³  The Joseph Smith Papers editors call this a paraphrase.  In their words, "While the phrasing in the appeal differed from the earlier account, Phelps nevertheless captured the essence of Van Buren's response."¹³  The famous sentence reads like a blend of the two documents.  The 1839 letter supplies "I can do nothing for you."  The 1843 pamphlet supplies "your cause is just."  The 1839 letter is the better source, being the earliest surviving account, and it is damning enough without improvement.

The Danites

In the summer of 1838 some Latter-day Saints at Far West organized a society called the Daughters of Zion, later the Danites. The best evidence for what it was comes from the criminal court of inquiry held before Judge Austin A. King at Richmond in November 1838, printed by order of the Missouri General Assembly in 1841.

The state's lead witness was Sampson Avard, the society's own organizer, who turned state's evidence. His account puts responsibility as high as it can go. He testified that the band's "original object" was "to drive from the county of Caldwell all those who dissented from the Mormon church; in which they succeeded admirably"¹; that "I consider Joseph Smith, jr., as the prime mover and organizer of this Danite band"; and that "the Danite band felt themselves as much bound to obey them, as to obey the Supreme God."¹ He gave the oath verbatim: "In the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, I do solemnly obligate myself ever to conceal, and never to reveal, the secret purposes of this society called the Daughters of Zion. Should I ever do the same, I hold my life as the forfeiture."¹

Avard's testimony must be discounted for the obvious reason. He was the man most exposed, he was testifying for the prosecution against his own leaders, and he was not himself charged. That is exactly the position in which a witness inflates his superiors' knowledge and minimizes his own initiative.

Two things survive the discount.

First, Avard himself conceded the limit: "As for Joseph Smith, jr., and his two counsellors, the witness does not know that they ever took the Danite oath."¹

Second, other witnesses independently confirm the society, the oath, and a connection to the presidency without adopting Avard's framing. John Corrill, a Church officer and no ally of Avard's, testified that he was invited to a meeting "where an oath, in substance the same as testified to by Dr. Avard, was administered," that the society "was ultimately organized into companies, and captains of tens and fifties were appointed,"¹ and, in the sentence that matters most, "I think the original object of the Danite band was to operate on the dissenters; but afterwards it grew into a system to carry out the designs of the presidency; and, if necessary to use physical force to upbuild the kingdom of God; it was to be done by them." He added, "It was my understanding that Dr. Avard's teaching in the Danite society proceeded from the presidency."¹ Corrill also said he had never heard the written Danite constitution read in his presence and had not heard of it until recently, a limit he was honest enough to state.

The documented act is not folklore. In June 1838 a letter went to Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, John Whitmer, William W. Phelps, and Lyman E. Johnson. It gave them "three days after you receive this communication to you, including twenty-four hours in each day, for you to depart with your families peaceably," told them "out of the county you shall go, and no power shall save you," warned that "there is but one decree for you, which is depart, depart, or a more fatal calamity shall befall you," and ended "we will put you from the county of Caldwell so help us God."¹ The printed document records that it "was signed by some 83 Mormons," Sampson Avard's name first. Avard testified that it "was draughted by Sidney Rigdon."¹ John Corrill testified that Rigdon had preached the sermon "commonly called the Salt sermon, which seemed to have for its object to produce a feeling among the people to get rid of the dissenters," and that within a few days the dissenters left because he had warned them they were in danger.

Note who the recipients were. Cowdery and David Whitmer were two of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon. The letter says so, and says that the signers "believe now, as much as before you had so scandalously disgraced it."¹ The Church expelled two of its founding witnesses from their homes by written threat while continuing to affirm their testimony.

The Church's present position is a fair summary of where the evidence lands: "Historians generally concur that Joseph Smith approved of the Danites but that he probably was not briefed on all their plans and likely did not sanction the full range of their activities."¹⁴ The Danites existed for five months and operated in two counties. The later legend of a permanent secret order of Mormon assassins is not history.

What the record does establish is that in June 1838 leading men of a religious community used organized threat to expel five of its own founders from their homes, and that at least one member of the First Presidency drafted the threat.

Rigdon's Fourth of July oration

On 4 July 1838, four months before Boggs's order, Sidney Rigdon, Joseph Smith's counselor in the First Presidency, delivered an oration at Far West. It was printed as a pamphlet at Far West later that summer. The conclusion reads:

We take God and all the holy angels to witness this day, that we warn all men in the name of Jesus Christ, to come on us no more forever, for from this hour, we will bear it no more, our rights shall no more be trampled on with impunity. The man or the set of men, who attempts it, does it at the expense of their lives. And that mob that comes on us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them, till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us: for we will carry the seat of war to their own houses, and their own families, and one party or the other shall be utterly destroyed.¹⁵

Four things must be said about this together. Leaving out any one of them produces a false picture.

It does not justify the extermination order. Boggs directed the armed power of a state against a civilian population; Rigdon threatened retaliation against attackers.

It is nonetheless part of the escalation, and it came first. Latter-day Saint accounts that present 1838 as a year in which peaceable people were simply set upon cannot accommodate this speech.

The same oration also says, a sentence later, "We will never be the agressors, we will infringe on the rights of no people; but shall stand for our own until death." The spelling is the pamphlet's.¹⁵

The threat also tracks a revealed rule the Saints already had. Doctrine and Covenants 98, an 1833 revelation, tells them that if an enemy smites them once and they "bear it patiently and revile not against them," they will be rewarded; that a second and a third forbearance multiply the reward; and only then that "thine enemy is in thine hands; and if thou rewardest him according to his works thou art justified."¹⁶ Rigdon's structure is the same structure: we have borne it, we have warned you, from this hour we bear it no more. Read that way the oration is framed as obedience to a rule of escalation rather than as a call to attack. That framing is this article's own reading of the two texts side by side, not a claim about what any editor has written.

The phrase was also less exotic in 1838 than it sounds now. "War of extermination" was standard period usage for a conflict fought to a finish, and it is the same well Boggs drew from nearly four months later.

How official was it?  It was printed as a pamphlet at Far West, at the Church's own press.  No contemporary document says whether Rigdon composed it alone or whether the First Presidency prepared it together.  The one witness who speaks to the point is the man who printed it.  Ebenezer Robinson set the type for the pamphlet in the office of the Elders' Journal.  In November 1889, in his own paper The Return, he wrote:

Let it be distinctly understood that President Rigdon was not alone responsible for the sentiment expressed in his oration, as that was a carefully prepared document, previously written, and well understood by the First Presidency, but Elder Rigdon was the mouth piece to deliver it, as he was a natural orator, and his delivery was powerful and effective.¹⁷

Robinson adds that Joseph Smith was "President" of the day and Hyrum Smith "Vice President of the day," and that at the end "the President of the day led off with the shout of Hosanna," which the crowd took up.¹⁷  He also gives his own judgment of the effect:  "This oration, and the stand taken by the church in endorsing it, and its publication, undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence in arousing the people of the whole upper Missouri country."¹⁷

This is a later firsthand recollection, and it has to be weighed as one.  Robinson was present and printed the pamphlet.  He also wrote fifty-one years after the event and long after he had left the Church, in a paper he edited himself at Davis City, Iowa.  A man who has left has a motive to load the First Presidency with blame.  What he reports is still specific, checkable in part, and unlikely to be invented:  that the speech was written out beforehand, that Joseph Smith presided, and that the Church's own press printed it.  The fair reading is that the oration was an official act of the First Presidency, with the caution that the only direct testimony to its joint preparation is late and comes from a dissenter.

On the three authority axes: present status, nothing. Historical authority, high for its moment:  a member of the First Presidency, speaking publicly at an official gathering, printed as a pamphlet by the Church's own press, and not disavowed at the time. Prophetic significance, medium:  it is a serious question whether leadership claiming present revelation should have foreseen how this speech would be read by armed neighbors.

Nauvoo: charter, legion, and fused offices

The Illinois legislature approved the act incorporating Nauvoo on 16 December 1840. The city council organized the Nauvoo Legion by ordinance on 3 February 1841, and on 4 February Joseph Smith was made its lieutenant general.

The charter did three things that mattered.  The Joseph Smith Papers editors name them:  "the municipal court's authority to grant writs of habeas corpus, the city council's ability to create legislation, and the chartering of the Nauvoo Legion."  Because of those powers, they write, the act "became the primary focal point of anti-Mormon hostility in the coming years."¹⁸

Habeas corpus.  Section 17 made the mayor the chief justice of the city's own court.  The Municipal Court "shall be composed of the Mayor as Chief Justice, and the Aldermen as Associate Justices," and it "shall have power to grant writs of habeas corpus in all cases arising under the ordinances of the City Council."¹⁸  Read strictly, that covers only arrests made under city ordinances.  The city read it broadly.  Governor Thomas Ford, who was no friend of Nauvoo, records that a later city ordinance gave the court power "to issue writs of habeas corpus in all cases of imprisonment," and that in 1843 the two rival candidates for Congress, the Whig Cyrus Walker and the Democrat Hoge, stood before a Nauvoo assembly and "gave their solemn opinion in favor of the power."¹⁹  Ford thought the opinion was wrong and the lawyers knew it.  The result was that a man arrested on a state or Missouri writ could be brought before a court whose chief justice was Joseph Smith and be discharged.

The power was not a Nauvoo invention.  The editors note that the cities of Chicago and Alton had the same authority, added in 1837 and 1839, and that "most of the individual powers and stipulations were not unique to Nauvoo's incorporating act."  What was unusual was the combination, which "made Nauvoo's charters atypical among those of Illinois cities."¹⁸

The Legion.  Section 25 let the city council organize "a body of independent military men to be called the 'Nauvoo Legion.'"  Its officers were commissioned by the governor.  It was "at the disposal of the Mayor in executing the laws and ordinances of the City Corporation," and at the governor's disposal for public defence, and it was "entitled to their proportion of the public arms."¹⁸  So the mayor of the city, who was also the Legion's lieutenant general and the chief justice of its court, could lawfully call out the militia to enforce a city ordinance.  On 10 June 1844, by Governor Ford's account, that is what happened.¹⁹

The Legion was large.  Richard L. Saunders, working from its surviving returns, gives 1,490 men for the whole Legion on 11 September 1841 and 1,751 for the Second Cohort alone at the end of 1843.  He estimates that a town of Nauvoo's size could have supplied about 3,000 militiamen, which is well below the traditional figure of 5,000.  He also warns that "few solid conclusions or extrapolations can be drawn from this data."²⁰

It was also poorly supplied by the state.  The arms were issued soon after the Legion was organized in 1841, not in 1842 as an earlier version of this article said.  Saunders dates the application to May 1841.  Governor Ford put the whole issue at "three pieces of cannon and about two hundred and fifty stand of small arms; which popular rumor increased to the number of thirty pieces of cannon and five or six thousand stand of muskets."¹⁹  The Legion's own 1843 return for the Second Cohort agrees.  It lists 63 muskets and 133 rifles for 1,751 men, with 98 swords and 4 pairs of pistols.²⁰  Saunders's conclusion:

All in all, the "General Return" essentially corroborates reports of the small numbers of arms provided to the Legion by the state.  It was not much.  Rather it was apparently a token allotment, which left the Legion to make up the difference with privately owned weapons.  Just how completely and well the Legion was thus able to equip itself is unknown, and is, of course, undeterminable from the return.²⁰

That last sentence corrects an earlier version of this article, which said the muster rolls proved the Legion could field only a couple of hundred working firearms.  They prove only that the state had issued about that many.  How many men carried their own rifles is not recorded.  Saunders's judgment of its readiness is still modest:  "this civilian militia in early 1844 seems to have been organized but not fully mobilized, and its rank and file members had probably not moved far beyond basic drill commands."²⁰

That gap between rumor and record is the heart of the Nauvoo problem.  What neighbors saw was a private army of two to three thousand men under the personal command of a religious prophet who was also the city's mayor and the chief justice of its municipal court, in a city whose own court used writs of habeas corpus to frustrate attempts to arrest him.  What they repeated to each other was thirty cannon and six thousand muskets.  What the state had issued was three cannon and about two hundred fifty guns.  Only the rumor was visible from Warsaw or Carthage.

The 1844 campaign.  On 29 January 1844 Joseph Smith agreed to run for President of the United States.  His platform, General Smith's Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States, was drafted by Phelps on his instructions and printed at Nauvoo.²¹  It called on the slave states to "abolish slavery by the year 1850, or now," with owners paid from the sale of public lands.²¹  And it carried the lesson of Missouri straight into federal policy:

Give every man his constitutional freedom, and the president full power to send an army to suppress mobs; and the states authority to repeal and impugn that relic of folly, which makes it necessary for the governor of a state to make the demand of the president for troops, in cases of invasion or rebellion  The governor himself may be a mobber and, instead of being punished, as he should be for murder and treason, he may destroy the very lives, rights, and property he should protect.²¹

The governor who "may be a mobber" is Lilburn Boggs.  The plank is a fair answer to what Missouri did.  To a neighbor in Hancock County it also read as a militia general, mayor and judge asking for the command of the United States Army.

It is possible to say plainly that this concentration of religious, civil, judicial, and military authority in one man was alarming without conceding an inch to what the neighbors did about it.  Alarm is not a license to murder a prisoner.

The destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor

On 7 June 1844 a group of dissenters, William Law, formerly Second Counselor in the First Presidency, his brother Wilson, Charles Ivins, Charles and Robert Foster, and Francis and Chauncey Higbee, published the first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor. It attacked plural marriage, Joseph Smith's teaching on the nature of God, and his fusion of religious and civil power.

The city council met on 8 June and again on 10 June. The minutes of the 10 June sessions survive, and they show a council that had thought about the legal question and got part of the answer right.

The council first passed an ordinance on libels. It then took up, at Joseph Smith's suggestion, whether to suppress the paper. The Joseph Smith Papers editors summarize the outcome: "Most of the council's members expressed their approval of this course of action."²²

One councilor dissented. Benjamin Warrington, a city councilor who was not a member of the Church, urged caution. He suggested instead, in the editors' words, "giving the proprietors 'a few days' notice to desist publishing the alleged libels and assessing heavy fines for noncompliance. After deliberating, the city council rejected Warrington's suggestion." It then "passed a resolution declaring the Expositor a nuisance and ordering JS as mayor to remove any printing equipment and copies of the newspaper found in its office in a manner of his choosing."²²

That evening, in the Church's own account, "the marshal and his posse of approximately 100 men removed the press, scattered the type, and burned the remaining copies of the newspaper."²³

The debate, from the clerk's rough minutes.  Willard Richards, the council's clerk, took the minutes as the council talked.  The Joseph Smith Papers print his rough minute book, pages 19 to 31.  Letters in square brackets below are the editors' expansions of his shorthand.  Words Richards struck out are left out.  Joseph Smith appears as "Mayor," councilors as "C.," and aldermen as "A."

Joseph Smith opened the morning session by saying that "if he had a city council who felt as he did. the establishm[e]nt. (refering to the Nauvoo Expos[i]tor) would be a Nuisanc[e] before night."  He gave his reason in terms of 1838:  "What the opposition party wanted. was to raise a mob on us and take the spoil of us as they did in Missouri."  And he "said he would rath[e]r die to morrow and have the thing smashed.— than live & have it go on."²²

In the afternoon the council passed the libel ordinance.  Then:  "Mayor Said the Constitution did not authorize the press to publish Libels— And p[r]oposed the council make some provision for putting— down the Nauvoo Expositors."²²  William W. Phelps read the Illinois constitution.  The mayor "calld for the charter."  John Taylor "read from the constituti[o]n of the U. S.— on freedom of the press.— we are willing th[e]y should publish the truth— but the paper is a nuisanc— and stinks in the nose of eve[r]y honest man."²²

Councilor George P. Stiles supplied the law.  "Nuisanc is any thing distu[r]bs the peac[e] of community.— & Read. Chitty's Blackston[e] page 4. Privat[e] wrongs Vol 2."  He then stated the aim:  "if we can prevent the issiung [issuing] of any more slanderous" communications he "would go in for it," and "I would go in for suppressing all further publicat[ion]s of the kind."²²  Hyrum Smith was blunter.  He "be[lie]ved the be[s]t way" was "to smash the press all to pieces and pie the type."²²

Benjamin Warrington then dissented.  He "consi[de]red his a peculiar situtin [situation] for the city co[u]ncil to pass this a nuisance would be hasty. & p[r]opose g[iv]ing a few days limatin [limitation]— & assess a fine of $3000.00 for every libel.— & if they would not cease publish[in]g libe[l]s declare it a nuisance."  The minutes record the response:  "Mayor was sorry to have one dissenti[n]g voice."  Warrington backed down part of the way.  He "did not mean to be und[er]stood to go vs but not be in haste."²²

The reasons others gave for haste are revealing.  Alderman Elias Smith "conserd [considered] there is but one cour[s]e to pu[r]sue th[e]y were out of the rea[c]h of the law.— one cour[s]e to put and end to the thing at once.— beli[e]ved if the city did not do it othrs would."²²  Alderman Orson Spencer asked, "If we pass only a fine or impismnt [imprisonment]. have we any confiden[ce] that th[e]y will dsit [desist]?  None at all."²²  Councilor Phineas Richards "referd to the scurry at Haun Mills [Hawn's Mill]— & the death of his son at that place.— said he could not sit still when he saw the same spirit aris[i]ng in this place."  His son had been one of the seventeen killed there.  Phelps closed the legal argument:  "the power to declare that office a nuisac [nuisance] is gra[n]ted to us in the Springfield Cha[r]ter, and a relolutin [resolution] d[e]claring it a nuisan[c]e is all that is req[u]ired."²²

Then:  "Resoluti[o]n on the pr[i]nting press. read. and pas[s]ed."  The resolution as finally written reads:

Resolved by the City Council of the City of Nauvoo that the printing establishment from whence issues the "Nauvoo Expositor" is a public Nuisance and also all of said Nauvoo Expositors which may be, or exist in said establishment, and the Mayor is instructed to cause said printing establishment and papers to be removed without delay, in such manner as he shall direct.²²

Three things stand out in these minutes.  The council did argue law, and it argued the right books.  It was also afraid, and with cause:  one man in that room had lost a son at Hawn's Mill, and others had been driven out of Missouri.  And nobody who owned the press was in the room.  The council heard sworn testimony against the characters of William and Wilson Law, Robert Foster and Francis Higbee.  It did not notify them, hear them, or call a jury.

Was it lawful? Partly, and the honest answer is more interesting than either side's version.

The First Amendment did not bind states or cities in 1844. The Church's own history topic puts the point plainly: it "applied only to the federal government, not state and local governments, until after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868."²³ The same page records that Joseph Smith, during the council meetings, "cited both American legal precedent and William Blackstone's commentary (an influential treatise on common law), interpreting these sources as allowing the destruction of the Expositor on the grounds that it was a public nuisance." And it notes that suppressing a press was unusual but not unheard of: "As late as 1929, a state supreme court approved the closure of a press considered a 'nuisance' (though this was later reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court)."²³

Where the council's authority ran out is where the scholarship has landed, and the Church states it: "the Nauvoo City Council acted legally to destroy copies of the newspaper but may have exceeded its authority by destroying the press itself."²³

The three texts the council relied on.  All three can be read, and each one cuts both ways.

The charter.  Section 13 gave Nauvoo the legislative powers of the city of Springfield.  Among them, in a clause about public health, is the power "to declare what shall be a nuisance, and to prevent and remove the same."¹⁸  Phelps was right that the power existed.  The editors note it "was commonly granted to cities in Illinois."²²

Blackstone.  The page Stiles read is in the New York edition of the Commentaries that carried Joseph Chitty's notes.  Blackstone's text says that "whatsoever unlawfully annoys or doth damage to another is a nusance; and such nusance may be abated, that is, taken away or removed, by the party aggrieved thereby, so as he commits no riot in the doing of it."²⁴  His examples are a wall that blocks a neighbor's windows and a gate built across a public road.  His reason is speed:  such injuries "require an immediate remedy; and cannot wait for the slow progress of the ordinary forms of justice."  The condition is in the same sentence.  The abatement must be done without riot.  Riot was the charge on which Joseph Smith was called to Carthage.

Chitty.  The note at the foot of that page is the only place the book mentions a newspaper:

So it seems that a libellous print or paper, affecting a private individual, may be destroyed, or, which is the safer course, taken and delivered to a magistrate.²⁴

That is authority for destroying a libellous paper.  It says nothing about a printing press, and it calls the magistrate "the safer course."  The same note sets the limit that matters:  "it is a general rule, that the abatement must be limited by its necessity, and no wanton or unnecessary injury must be committed," and "so much only of the thing as causes the nuisance shall be removed."²⁴  The copies were the thing that caused the nuisance.  The press was the means of printing the next issue.

And that is where Blackstone turns against the council.  In the fourth book he defines the liberty of the press:

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published.  Every freeman has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public: to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press: but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous, or illegal, he must take the consequence of his own temerity.²⁴

On this rule the council could punish the Expositor for what it had printed.  The libel ordinance passed that afternoon was a law of that kind.  What the council could not do, on Blackstone's own terms, was stop the next issue before it appeared.  Stiles said that was the aim:  to "prevent the issiung [issuing] of any more."  Destroying the press was a previous restraint.  The article's distinction between the copies and the press comes straight from the book the council read aloud.

Governor Ford reached the same result by a different road.  He was hostile to the Saints, and his language shows it, but his list of defects is a lawyer's list:

The common council violated the law in assuming the exercise of judicial power; in proceeding ex parte without notice to the owners of the property; in proceeding against the property in rem; in not calling a jury; in not swearing all the witnesses; in not giving the owners of the property, accused of being a nuisance, in consequence of being libelous, an opportunity of giving the truth in evidence; and in fact, by not proceeding by civil suit or indictment, as in other cases of libel.¹⁹

The causal chain to Carthage is direct and short. Thomas Sharp's Warsaw Signal used the destruction to mobilize Hancock County. Governor Thomas Ford reviewed the council's reasoning and concluded that Joseph Smith had to stand trial at Carthage on a charge of riot.²³  He also took back the state's cannon and muskets, in his words "because the legion was illegally used in the destruction of the press, and in enforcing martial law in the city, in open resistance to legal process, and the posse comitatus."¹⁹ Smith went to Carthage on Ford's promise of protection. He was dead seventeen days after the press was destroyed.

Carthage, 27 June 1844

Joseph and Hyrum Smith surrendered, were charged additionally with treason, and were held in the upstairs room of the jail at Carthage. Late in the afternoon of 27 June an armed mob stormed the building and fired into the room. Hyrum was killed almost at once. Joseph went to the window, was shot in the chest and back, fell to the ground below, and was probably shot again. John Taylor was hit four times and survived. Willard Richards was unhurt.⁹

Five men were indicted and tried at Carthage in May 1845. Latter-day Saints were encouraged not to testify or attend, out of a belief that the court was stacked against them and a fear of provoking more violence. Without their testimony the prosecutor could present little credible evidence, and the jury acquitted all five. The Church's own history topic notes that "this has led some scholars to view it as a sham trial."⁹

The Church's historians also record something critics of Mormonism should register: the stories that circulated among Latter-day Saints about terrible fates befalling the killers have been researched and are "folklore and not history."⁹ A tradition willing to retire its own vengeance legends has earned some credit.

Who the mob was.  Two early sources from opposite sides agree.  The Latter-day Saint announcement of the deaths, printed at the end of the 1844 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants and now section 135, says the brothers were shot "by an armed mob—painted black—of from 150 to 200 persons."²⁵  Governor Ford, in his History of Illinois, published in 1854, says who they were.  The militia at Warsaw had marched that morning toward Nauvoo.  About eight miles out they "were met by the order to disband; and learning at the same time that the governor was absent at Nauvoo, about two hundred of these men, many of them being disguised by blacking their faces with powder and mud, hastened immediately to Carthage."¹⁹

So the killers came from the Warsaw force, which had been called out under orders and had just been disbanded.  Ford also records why the guard failed.  One company left to protect the jail had already gone home.  The other, the Carthage Greys, "was stationed by the captain in the public square, a hundred and fifty yards from the jail," with only a small detail at the door.  Then:  "it was arranged that the guard should have their guns charged with blank cartridges, and fire at the assailants when they attempted to enter the jail."¹⁹  Ford's chapter heading for this is "Treachery of the Carthage Greys."

Ford is the governor whose promise of protection failed, and he had every reason to shift blame onto the militia.  That is a real limit on him as a witness.  But the blackened faces and the size of the mob, about two hundred, are in his account and in the Saints' own, which was in print ten years before his.  That the men came from the disbanded Warsaw force is Ford's statement alone.  The earlier draft declined to assert either detail.

Expulsion from Nauvoo, 1846

The main body of Latter-day Saints began leaving Nauvoo in February 1846 and camped across Iowa and Nebraska. By the Church's own reckoning about one in twelve died in those camps in the first year. Some of the elderly and poor stayed behind hoping to follow; a mob drove them out in September 1846 and desecrated the temple. The Church's essay quotes an unnamed observer on what came next.  He was Thomas L. Kane of Philadelphia, who saw the refugees on the Iowa shore in the fourth week of September 1846 and described them to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1850.  The refugees were "almost all of them, the crippled victims of disease. … They could not satisfy the feeble cravings of their sick: they had not bread to quiet the fractious hunger cries of their children."³²⁶

The Reformation and the Utah War

From September 1856 to about April 1857 Brigham Young and other leaders conducted a territory-wide revival known as the Mormon Reformation. Jedediah M. Grant, Young's counselor in the First Presidency, launched it; within days of his first preaching five hundred people were rebaptized. "Home missionaries" went house to house with lists of questions. Most Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City were rebaptized before it ended. Many later said it made them better people, and that should not be dismissed.

At the same time federal appointees reported to Washington that Utah was in rebellion. In 1857 President James Buchanan sent an army to install Alfred Cumming as governor in place of Brigham Young. At least 1,500 soldiers marched west in what the Church's own history calls "the largest and most expensive armed undertaking of the United States during the period between the Mexican-American War and the American Civil War."²⁷ Buchanan said his object was to restore "the sovereignty of the Constitution and laws over the Territory of Utah."²⁷

Latter-day Saints expected Missouri and Illinois to happen again. Brigham Young declared martial law, called in outlying missionaries and settlers, ordered grain saved and cached, and put the territorial militia on alert. Militiamen burned Fort Bridger, destroyed supply wagons, and stampeded the army's animals. No pitched battle was fought, and the conflict ended in negotiation in 1858.

Two more things fell into that summer. Apostle Parley P. Pratt was murdered in Arkansas in May 1857, and eastern newspapers celebrated it. And a wagon train from Arkansas was on the road south through Utah.

Blood atonement

This is the topic on which both sides most often overstate, so the sequence matters: what was said, with what authority, whether it was acted on, and what the Church says now.

What was said. On 21 September 1856, in the Bowery at Great Salt Lake City, Jedediah M. Grant preached a sermon printed as "Rebuking Iniquity." It ends:

Brethren and sisters, we want you to repent and forsake your sins. And you who have committed sins that cannot be forgiven through baptism, let your blood be shed, and let the smoke ascend, that the incense thereof may come up before God as an atonement for your sins, and that the sinners in Zion may be afraid.²⁸

Brigham Young spoke the same day:

There are sins that men commit for which they cannot receive forgiveness in this world, or in that which is to come, and if they had their eyes open to see their true condition, they would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt upon the ground, that the smoke thereof might ascend to heaven as an offering for their sins; and the smoking incense would atone for their sins.²⁹

He went further in the same sermon: "there are sins that the blood of a lamb, of a calf, or of turtle doves, cannot remit, but they must be atoned for by the blood of the man." And: "I have had men come to me and offer their lives to atone for their sins." He also told the congregation that this was established teaching they had failed to grasp:  "though the principles are taught publicly from this stand, still the people do not understand them; yet the law is precisely the same."²⁹

On 8 February 1857 Young preached again in the Tabernacle, in a sermon the Journal of Discourses printed under a compound heading ending "Atonement by the Shedding of Blood." There he turned the teaching into an application of loving one's neighbour:

This is loving our neighbour as ourselves; if he needs help, help him; and if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he may be saved, spill it.³⁰

And in the same sermon: "I could refer you to plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain, in order to atone for their sins."³⁰

With what authority. These were sermons, reported and published privately in the Journal of Discourses, which was never canonized. That is the correct answer on axis one, and it is not the whole answer. The speakers were the President of the Church and his counselor in the First Presidency. They spoke from the pulpit, in the Bowery and the Tabernacle, repeatedly, over months, during a campaign the President himself had ordered. Young told the congregation, in the September 1856 sermon, that this was established teaching they had failed to grasp. This is not an isolated remark that can be set aside as one man's opinion.

Was it carried out? Several widely repeated claims here fail, and this article does not make them. The Church's 2016 essay states that "a few Latter-day Saints committed other violent acts against a small number of dissenters and outsiders," that "the heated rhetoric of Church leaders directed toward dissenters may have led these Latter-day Saints to believe that such actions were justified," that "the perpetrators of these crimes were generally not punished," and equally that "many allegations of such violence are unfounded, and writers antagonistic to the Church have blamed its leaders for many unsolved crimes or suspicious deaths in early Utah."³ There is no evidence of an institutional program of executing sinners. What the evidence supports is that a small number of extralegal killings occurred in a climate this preaching helped create, and that they went unpunished.

What the Church says now. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1992), produced at Brigham Young University, states: "This view is not a doctrine of the Church and has never been practiced by the Church at any time." It explains the teaching as applying only in "a complete theocracy" that "has not been operative in modern times," so that "the practical effect of the idea was its use as a rhetorical device."³¹ The 2016 Gospel Topics essay concedes more directly that "leaders taught that some sins were so serious that the perpetrator's blood would have to be shed in order to receive forgiveness."³

The 1992 formulation does real work on axis one and less on axis two. Saying a teaching "has never been practiced by the Church" is compatible with everything above, because the question was never whether the institution ran executions. The question is whether the President of the Church taught, from the pulpit and in print, that some people ought to be killed for their own salvation. He did. On axis three that carries weight, because it was framed not as speculation but as a recovered law of God that the people had failed to understand.

Mountain Meadows, 11 September 1857

A wagon company from Arkansas, led by Alexander Fancher and John Baker, came south through Utah in late summer 1857 into a territory under martial law where settlers had been ordered not to sell grain. They quarreled with settlers over grazing and could not resupply. At Cedar City the store had nothing they needed and the miller demanded a cow to grind a few dozen bushels of grain. In the heat of that, one emigrant reportedly claimed he had the gun that killed Joseph Smith and others threatened to join the incoming troops. The company's own captain, Alexander Fancher, rebuked them on the spot. As the Church's own account puts it, "nothing that any of the emigrants purportedly did or said, even if all of it were true, came close to justifying their deaths."⁶

Cedar City's leaders took the threats seriously. Isaac C. Haight was simultaneously the city's mayor, a major in the militia, and the stake president. He asked the district militia commander, William Dame, also the Parowan stake president, for permission to call out the militia. Dame's council said no, and Dame's dispatch back read: "Do not notice their threats," and then, "Words are but wind—they injure no one; but if they (the emigrants) commit acts of violence against citizens inform me by express, and such measures will be adopted as will insure tranquility."⁶

Haight and others then formed a second plan: to persuade local Paiutes to give the company "a brush." John D. Lee, a militia major at Fort Harmony and a federally paid "Indian farmer," was drawn in. In a late-night conversation Lee told Haight that the Paiutes would "kill all the party, women and children, as well as the men" if incited.⁶ Haight agreed anyway, and the two planned to lay the blame on the Indians.

On 6 September Haight put the plan to a council of local leaders who held church, civic, and militia office at once. They were stunned, argued, and asked whether he had consulted Brigham Young. He had not, and agreed to send an express rider. Before the letter went, Lee and the recruited Paiutes attacked early, at the Mountain Meadows rather than at the planned site. The emigrants fought them off and corralled their wagons. A five-day siege followed.

Then the conspiracy trapped itself. Two Cedar City militiamen shot at two emigrant horsemen outside the corral, killed one, and let the other escape back to the camp knowing that white men were involved. On 9 September Haight went to Parowan again. Dame's council again decided to help the emigrants leave in peace. Haight and his counselor Elias Morris then got Dame alone and told him what they had withheld from the council. Dame gave way. Haight left believing he had permission and called out about two dozen more militiamen, most of them officers. He later said, "I would give a world if I had it, if we had abided by the deci[s]ion of the council."⁶

On 11 September Lee walked into the wagon fort under a white flag and told the emigrants the militia would escort them safely to Cedar City if they left their goods and surrendered their weapons. They had been pinned down for days with little water and their wounded were dying. They accepted.

The wounded and youngest children went first in two wagons, then the women and children on foot, then the men and older boys, each walking beside an armed militiaman. After about a mile, at a signal, each militiaman shot the man beside him. About 120 people were killed. Seventeen children were spared, in the Church's own phrase "considered 'too young to tell tales.'" They were adopted by local families, and federal officials retrieved them in 1859 and returned them to relatives in Arkansas.

The Church's own account notes that Nephi Johnson, one of the participants, later maintained that the militiamen, not the Paiutes, did most of the killing, despite the plan to place the blame on the Paiutes and "persistent subsequent efforts to do so."⁶ The Paiutes were blamed for a century and a half, and their descendants insulted for it.

Brigham Young's letter. Haight's express rider returned two days after the massacre with Young's reply, dated 10 September 1857:

In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements, we must not interfere with them untill 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[.] [I]f those who are there will leave let them go in peace. While we should be on the alert, on hand and always ready we should also possess ourselves in patience, preserving ourselves and property ever remembering that God rules.⁶

The letter opens on a different note, and honesty requires printing it: "So you see that the Lord has answered our prayers and again averted the blow designed for our heads," Young wrote, reporting news that no federal troops would reach the territory before winter. The instruction about the emigrants follows that relief. It is not a letter written in fear.⁶

Haight, reading it, "sobbed like a child and could manage only the words, 'Too late, too late.'"⁶

What the two Oxford volumes conclude. Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2008) was written by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, historians in the Church History Department, after every Church record on the massacre was opened to them and archives across the country were searched. Their conclusion, as the Church's own essay summarizes it, is that "while intemperate preaching about outsiders by Brigham Young, George A. Smith, and other leaders contributed to a climate of hostility, President Young did not order the massacre," and that "a series of tragic decisions by local Church leaders—who also held key civic and militia leadership roles in southern Utah—led to the massacre."³  The 2008 authors say the same in their own preface, and they do not confine the blame to southern Utah:  "We believe errors were made by U.S. president James Buchanan, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders, some of the Arkansas emigrants, some Paiutes, and most of all by settlers in southern Utah who set aside principles of their faith to commit an atrocity."³²

The cover-up.  Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown's Vengeance Is Mine (Oxford, 2023) is the sequel, and its second part is titled "Cover-Up."  This article read the book through the pages Google Books shows and through its search-inside results.  That is about eighty pages opened as page images, among them most of the pages on what Brigham Young was told and did between 1857 and 1876, and fragments elsewhere.  It did not read the whole book.  What follows is limited to passages actually seen, each with its page.

The cover-up began as the massacre itself.  The militia had already killed one emigrant outside the corral, and another had got back to camp knowing white men were involved.  Turley and Brown write that Haight, with Dame's authority, "had started the cover-up" of that murder and of Mormon cattle raiding "by ordering militiamen to massacre witnesses at the Meadows.  He hoped to make the atrocity appear to outsiders as if it was solely committed by Indians."³³  The hundred and twenty were killed so that they could not talk.

Silence was enforced at once.  At Fort Harmony, two days after the killing, John D. Lee told the congregation what he had done.  A messenger then handed him a note, probably word of Brigham Young's letter, and Lee "began covering up white involvement and laying blame solely on Indians."  One resident recalled that "the citizens of Harmony were called together and told that if they ever mentioned a word of . . . Lee's speech of Sunday their throats would be cut."³³  The surviving children were to be asked nothing, so that they would "forget everything."

Brigham Young was lied to.  On 29 September 1857 Lee reported to Young in Salt Lake City with Wilford Woodruff present.  Woodruff recorded it as "an awful tale of blood."  Lee pretended to have ridden express, so that the eighteen-day delay would not show.³³  He "lied to Brigham Young that 'Indians obtain[ed] all ther Cattle Horses & property guns &c.'"³³  The authors sum up the report:  Lee "blamed Indians for the murders, claiming no white men participated.  Most importantly, he concealed that he conspired with other local leaders to orchestrate the attack and the final slaughter."³³

Young was not the first to hear the false story.  Lee had told it in a speech at Provo two days earlier, rumors of an Indian massacre had reached Salt Lake City the day before, and settlers in northern and central Utah already "believed the white perpetrators' story that Indians were solely responsible."³³  Lee himself later denied the lie.  In 1870 he protested to Young that he had told "the truth in 1857," with one exception.  The authors answer "In reality" and rest on Woodruff's journal, which was written on the day.³³

Young then had his own reason not to look hard.  That summer he had encouraged Indian leaders to take emigrant cattle as a war measure against the approaching army.  Turley and Brown say that after Lee's report "Young's efforts to engage Indians in raiding emigrant cattle and fighting U.S. troops ceased.  He did not mention the strategy again."³³  And among their explanations for his later inaction they offer this:  "Young may have also accepted what Lee had insinuated in his September 1857 report to him—that Indians had massacred the emigrants as a result of Young's strategy of encouraging Indian cattle raids during the Utah War, and thus as a consequence of his wartime leadership.  All wars have unintended consequences, but leaders rarely dwell on them."³³

The Indian story became the Church's record.  In August 1858 the apostle George A. Smith and a companion named McKnight went south, saw the bones on the field, and mailed a "history paper" to the Historian's Office in Salt Lake City.  Their version "placed full blame for the massacre on vengeful Indians.  Their paper reflected false motives and half-truths," tied to a chronology that was only partly accurate.³³  That is a book begun in the Church History Department calling a report filed in the Church's own Historian's Office a paper of "half-truths."

The paper was not Smith's last word, and the Church did hold hearings that month.  At Parowan, Smith and the apostle Amasa Lyman sat for four days on complaints that local men had brought against Dame, and signed a finding that the complaints were "without foundation in truth."  On 17 August Smith wrote to Young.  The authors say "the substance and tenor of his account changed markedly after the Parowan hearing," and they quote the sentence that matters:  "It is reported that John D. Lee and a few other white men were on the ground during a portion of the combat, but for what purpose, or how they conducted, or whether indeed they were there at all, I have not learned."³³  A week later three apostles heard complaints against Haight, Klingensmith and Lee at Cedar City.  Lee wrote that he was charged with "having used an influence against Pres. Haight[,] but was exhoneratd."³³  So from August 1858 Young had an apostle's written report that white men were said to have been at the Meadows, and two Church hearings had sat.  On the pages seen, neither disciplined anyone for the massacre.  The 1858 paper stayed on file with a clerk's amendment correcting its dates, and in the fall of 1869 Smith still "maintained that Indians were solely responsible for the massacre—in spite of evidence to the contrary."³³

When federal officers came in 1859, the settlements closed ranks.  The authors describe a community disposed "to protect their own—even criminals among them—from outside forces they saw as unfair and anti-Mormon, particularly federal forces," and they quote Lee:  "true harted Saints will not go to law before Gentile Courts."³³  Young's position that year was conditional cooperation.  On 12 May 1859 he filed an affidavit in the Salt Lake County probate court.  Judge Cradlebaugh had charged him before a grand jury with being an accessory, and Young asked for "a fair and impartial investigation and trial."  The authors add that he "also encouraged others implicated in the massacre to stand trial."³³  By then he was hearing more than Lee's story.  On 18 June Jacob Hamblin, who had just learned that white participation was far wider than he had imagined, met Young with George A. Smith.  The authors write that Hamblin "undoubtedly told Young what he had learned."  The clerk recorded Young's answer:  once a court could sit "without the influence of the military he should advise men accused to come forward and demand trial."³³  When the United States district attorney, Wilson, asked for help "making some arrests of parties accused of being engaged in" the massacre, Young answered that if the judges would hold court "at Parowan or some other convenient location in the south," a court "unprejudiced and uninfluenced by the presence of the army," he "would go there himself."  On those terms he promised that "he would use all his influence to have the parties arrested and have the whole matter investigated thoroughly and impartially and justice meeted out to every man."  He drew the line at a military posse sent "to arrest men to be treated like dogs."  In that case he "would not use his influence or crook his finger to arrest any person."³³  The offer was not taken up, and by the authors' account the refusal was on the federal side.  The judge held court at Nephi, "a long distance from key witnesses, suspects, and evidence of the massacre," and the United States marshal would neither attempt the arrests without soldiers nor deputize a Latter-day Saint to make them.³³  Of 1876 the authors write:  "Until now, prosecutors had never asked Young to make good on his offer."³³

Church discipline waited thirteen years, and it did not wait for want of suspicion.  In April 1863, by a journal account the authors quote, Lee again "tried to blame the Indians for the massacre," but "Pres Young, would not accept his testimony" and told him he would never dwell where God is.  Yet "no formal or public action was taken against him at the time."  Young "seemed to back off," and Lee "maintained enough good standing in the church to be sealed to his last plural wife in 1865."³³  Young did denounce the massacre from the Tabernacle in those years, and the book's index records, on a page Google Books does not display, that he "told Erastus Snow not to extend temple blessings to MMM participants."³³  The authors give their own explanation for the delay, and it is not concealment.  Young "may have been subject to confirmation bias."  He "didn't want to believe Lee and other church members had a hand in such a horrific act, especially when they denied it."  George A. Smith, his trusted adviser, "continued to maintain that Indians were primarily if not solely responsible."  And Young "lacked civil authority to investigate the crime and, with all the conflicting accounts, preferred to have government authorities do it anyway."³³  In 1870 Young "learned more information from Latter-day Saints he trusted, like Nephi Johnson and Erastus Snow.  Unable to conceal the extent of his participation from Young any longer, Lee pivoted, attempting to justify his participation on moral or religious grounds."³³  Young excommunicated Lee, Haight and a third man that year.  When Lee asked why he must be cut off "after thirteen years of fellowship," Young "replied that they had never learned the particuelars until lately."  What followed was not openness.  The apostle Erastus Snow cancelled the rehearing Lee had been promised, saying "the least Said at presant, the better."  An anonymous letter, "delivered by Snow's son," told Lee:  "Make yourself scarce & keep out of the way."³³  In 1876 Church leaders cooperated with the federal prosecutor, Howard.  Lee was convicted at his second trial that September and was shot at the Meadows in March 1877.  The authors reject the old charge that Lee was offered up to save the rest.  That, they write, "became a myth passed down for generations.  In reality, Lee's conviction was only the first that Howard sought."³³  No second conviction came.

The people who paid longest were the Paiutes.  "From the beginning, the men who orchestrated the massacre planned to saddle Paiutes with the crime.  Although the vast majority of the region's Paiutes played no role, they and their posterity suffered under the burden of being blamed for the atrocity."³³

The verdict on the cover-up.  Four findings, in descending order of certainty.

1. The cover-up was the work of the men who planned the massacre. Haight, Dame and Lee began it on the field, enforced it with threats, and kept it up for years. This is established by the Church's own historians from the Church's own records.
2. Brigham Young did not start it and was deceived by it. He was told a false story eighteen days after the fact by a man who hid his own part. He was not its first hearer: the story had already been told at Harmony and Provo and had reached Salt Lake City as rumor. The charge that Young directed the concealment from the beginning is not supported by anything seen.
3. Young and the institution then carried the false story for years. It went into the Historian's Office in 1858 as a report that the Church's historians now call false, and the man who signed it was still repeating it in 1869. Young was governor until 1858 and the territory's superintendent of Indian affairs. He had the means to test Lee's account and a motive not to, since the Indian story pointed back at his own wartime policy. He was not kept in ignorance for thirteen years. An apostle wrote to him in August 1858 that Lee and other white men were reported on the ground. Hamblin brought him more in June 1859. In 1863 he refused Lee's story to Lee's face. The Church did act in part: two hearings in 1858, which on the pages seen disciplined no one for the massacre, and the removal of the Cedar City leaders from office in 1859. No Church court cut a participant off until 1870. That is not proof of a conspiracy, and the Church's historians explain it as confirmation bias and a wish to leave the matter to the courts. It is still at least seven years, from 1863 to 1870, in which the President of the Church no longer accepted Lee's account and took no formal action against him, and thirteen years before any participant lost his membership.
4. Whether Young's conduct between 1859 and 1876 amounts to obstruction is not settled by the pages read. His offer to help was real. It was made in a court filing in 1859, repeated in public a few years later, and conditioned on a court he trusted, sitting in the south without the army. By the authors' account it was federal officers who declined those terms in 1859. Prosecutors did not take the offer up until 1876, and when they did, a conviction followed. Against that stand the closed ranks of 1859, the long delay in Church discipline, the cancelled rehearing and the anonymous warning to Lee at the end of 1870, which came through an apostle's household, and the fact that of some fifty or sixty militiamen only one was ever convicted. The pages for several of these years were not available (they are listed in the note on the book). A reader of the whole book may be able to say more. This article cannot.

The cover-up verdict supports the article's main claim and does not depend on Young's guilt.  The men who lied were bishops, stake presidents and militia officers at once.  The community that kept silent did so because it trusted its own leaders more than any outside court.  Fused office made the massacre possible, and the same fusion made the silence possible.

Accountability. Haight and other Cedar City leaders lost their Church callings in 1859.  The Church's 2007 account presents that as an act of its leaders:  "In 1859 they released from their callings stake president Isaac Haight and other prominent Church leaders in Cedar City who had a role in the massacre."⁶  How far it was discipline is not clear, because the two accounts from the time differ.  Haight's own journal, as Turley and Brown quote it, says "in consequence of the persecution of our enemies I solicited to be released from the presidency of this Stake as my Enemies Swore they would destroy me if they could get me."  Henry Lunt, who replaced him, remembered George A. Smith announcing that "President [Young] has instructed me to come and disorganize this Stake of Zion."  The authors give Cedar City's falling population as one reason the offices were merged and add:  "Yet the massacre was also a factor."³³ Haight and Lee were excommunicated in 1870. A territorial grand jury indicted nine men in 1874. Only John D. Lee was tried, convicted, and executed, in 1877, twenty years after the killings, and alone.⁴

Violence involving Indigenous peoples

Latter-day Saints settled on land that Ute, Paiute, Goshute, and Shoshone peoples used. Their theology told them these were Israelites and heirs of covenant promises, which produced both real missionary effort and real condescension. Brigham Young, simultaneously Church president, territorial governor, and territorial superintendent of Indian Affairs, pursued a stated peace policy. The Church's own essay says the policy "emerged unevenly and was inconsistently applied," which is putting it gently.³

In late 1849 a Church member killed a Ute known as Old Bishop over an accusation of stealing a shirt, and he and two others hid the body in the Provo River. Local Saints refused to hand over the killers or pay reparations. A measles epidemic spread from settlers to Ute camps. In February 1850 Governor Young authorized a campaign that killed dozens of Utes and one settler. Young's own earlier counsel had been to "stockade your fort, to attend to your own affairs and let the Indians take care of theirs."³

The Walker War began on 17 July 1853, when James Ivie killed a Ute man named Shower-O-Cats near Springville during a quarrel. Both sides then killed. Utes killed settlers at Fillmore, Fountain Green, Santaquin, and Manti, burned Spring City, and killed Captain John W. Gunnison and seven of his surveying party on 26 October 1853. Settlers responded with killings that were not battles. A militia unit near Goshen attacked a Ute camp and killed four or five people. The historian Thomas G. Alexander, in the account the Utah Division of State History publishes, puts it this way:  "At Nephi, on October 2, 1853, after eight or nine Utes came to the fort seeking protection, a group of townspeople slaughtered them 'like so many dogs' and then reported the murders as deaths during a skirmish."  He notes that this was done against orders:  "Instead of following a conciliatory policy as Young had directed, Mormon settlers responded in brutal kind."³⁴

The worst single episode came during the Black Hawk War, and the account here follows W. Paul Reeve's, written for the Utah Division of State History from Albert Winkler's 1987 Utah Historical Quarterly study.

Circleville was less than a year old when a Ute war party rode in on 26 November 1865, drove off the cattle, and killed four people:  James Froid, Hans Christian Hansen, and two thirteen-year-old boys, Orson Barney and Ole Heilersen. The following April two members of a local Piede band of Paiutes shot and wounded a soldier at Fort Sanford, seventeen miles away. The Paiutes near Circleville had traded with the town and had been on friendly terms with it. Fear that they might be spying for the Utes changed that.

Bishop William J. Allred asked the Piedes to a meeting, explained the situation, and asked them to surrender their guns; they "reluctantly complied and were then placed under guard." Major James Allred, commanding the Circleville militia, then surrounded the remaining camp. One man tried to escape and was shot. The rest were herded into the meetinghouse, where the men were tied up and the women and children put in the cellar. A message from their own commander instructing them to "see that those prisoners were treated kindly" arrived too late.

The men worked their ropes loose, waited for the guard to change, and rushed their captors. In the struggle all of them were shot and killed. Then, in Reeve's account, "the soldiers felt it necessary, as one resident put it, to 'dispose of the squaws and papooses' to prevent them from telling of the massacre and inciting further violence. The women and children were brought from the cellar one at a time and killed." A resident named A. C. Anderson recalled seeing the throat of the first one cut. "In all, at least 16 Piedes were massacred that day."⁵ Three or four children too young to talk were spared and adopted by local families.

Three things finish the account.

First, nobody was punished.  "Remarkably, federal and territorial officials as well as militia leaders all failed to take action, and no one was prosecuted for the murders."⁵  Albert Winkler's 1987 study, Reeve's source, shows how the militia command took the news.  On 3 May 1866 Daniel H. Wells, commander of the territorial militia and Brigham Young's counselor, wrote that he did not know what else the "brethren" could have done.  Erastus Snow, an apostle and a militia brigadier general, was less easy.  He wrote back on 28 May that he had heard by rumor of the "slaughter of 15 or 18 Piede prisoners" and regretted not making "a closer enquiry."  He left an investigation to Wells.  "Apparently Wells's mind was already made up, for no action was taken."⁵

Second, the toll is a floor.  Sixteen is the figure of the town's own bishop.  Winkler:  "It is uncertain how many were killed altogether.  Bishop Allred said sixteen were killed and four children were allowed to live. …  His number is plausible but may be considered the minimum possible figure."⁵  When the monument was announced in 2016 the Deseret News wrote of "as many as 30."³⁵  An earlier version of this article said the higher figures came from Paiute tribal accounts.  That was wrong.  The tribe's own text gives no number.

Third, the descendants have their own account, and it should be read in their words.  On 22 April 2016, a hundred and fifty years after the killings, a granite monument was dedicated at Circleville with inscriptions written by the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah.  The front reads:

In remembrance of the innocent who were lost in this place so long ago.  None of us can ever hope to describe the emotions that these people might have felt.  All we can do is honor their existence as human beings.³⁶

The back carries the oral tradition as Jimmy Timmican of the Koosharem band told it.  He had it, the inscription says, from Walker Ammon, "son of Chief Walker":

Years ago the white men at Circleville locked up in that house all the Indians who were living nearby and told them they were going to cut their throats.  They began doing this by taking them outside one at a time and cutting their throats.³⁶

The tradition goes on to tell of two young men who ran through the crowd as the door opened and escaped over the hill, one of them shot in the side.  It agrees with the settlers' own records on the two points that matter most:  the people were prisoners, and they were killed one at a time with knives.  The two differ on the order of events.  The settlers' accounts say the men were shot in a break for freedom and the throat-cutting followed.  The Paiute account puts the throat-cutting first and the escape after.

Analysis: comparison, not exceptionalism

The finding has two halves.  Counted by episodes, Latter-day Saint violence was ordinary for antebellum America and smaller than the violence done to the Saints.  Measured by its worst single act, it was not ordinary.  Mountain Meadows killed about five times as many people as the deadliest political riot of the period, and about as many in one afternoon as the worst of the Southern slave-insurrection panics killed or maimed over weeks.  The massacres of Native people in the same years were larger.  The difference between the two halves is explained by structure more than by temperament, though the comparison leaves that explanation less secure than an earlier version of this article said.

Mason's frame.  Patrick Q. Mason's Mormonism and Violence: The Battles of Zion (Cambridge, 2019) is the standard short treatment.  The book itself could not be obtained, and it is quoted here from Frederick W. Axelgard's review, which gives page numbers.  Mason begins by warning against his own title:

The danger of any sustained treatment of "X and violence" is that it inextricably links X with violence in the mind of the reader. . . .  At its worst, a book like this can actually be misleading.  Even if all the facts are correct, applying the "and violence" filter to one's subject will necessarily highlight certain aspects while entirely obscuring others.⁸

That warning applies to this article.  A long article on violence makes a people look violent.  Mason still insists on "the very real strain of violence that runs through Latter-day Saint scripture, history, and culture," and he calls the 1850s "the most lethal decade in Latter-day Saint history."⁸  His sentence on frequency is the one quoted near the top of this article:  historians "can name virtually every instance."⁸  And his summary of what came after the Reformation is exact:  "the appetite for using violence as a legitimate method of building the kingdom of God seems to have waned," and the next generation of leaders "undertook the project of renouncing the violence that their forebears had selectively embraced."⁸  "Selectively embraced" is the right phrase.  It concedes that violence was embraced, by leaders, for the kingdom.  It also says the embrace was partial and was given up.

The comparison class.  The right yardstick is American mob and vigilante violence in the same decades.  David Grimsted's American Mobbing, 1828–1861 (Oxford, 1998) counts 1,218 riots in those years.³⁷  Their targets included abolitionists, Irish and German immigrants, black Americans, banks, and Mormons.  The Church's own essay makes the same case competently:  Congress required in 1792 that every able-bodied man between eighteen and forty-five belong to a community militia; those militias were often unruly; extralegal vigilantism was widely regarded as patriotic; and vigilantes generally targeted minorities.³  The Jackson County committee's imitation of the Declaration of Independence is the clearest single illustration.

Three items from Grimsted set the scale.

• Presses. Destroying an unpopular press was a familiar act. At Alton, Illinois, in 1837, seven years before the Expositor and in the same state, the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy "quietly bought a new press three times after mob destruction in Alton before attempting physically to protect the fourth." He "was killed defending his press."³⁷ Nauvoo destroyed one press, by ordinance, through its marshal, and hurt nobody. By the standards of Illinois in those years that was mild. It was also done by a government, which a mob is not.
• The deadliest political riot. Grimsted calls the Louisville election riot of 1855, a Know-Nothing riot in which most of the dead were German and Irish immigrants, "this deadliest of American political riots." It took "twenty-two lives." Baltimore's worst season, a year later, killed fourteen.³⁷
• The deadliest mobs. Election riots were not Grimsted's deadliest class. That was the Southern insurrection panic, in which mobs and vigilance committees killed slaves and suspected abolitionists on rumor. He counts thirty-five such episodes and "448 persons" killed. The worst were Virginia after Nat Turner's revolt in 1831, where he accepts "estimates of from 100 to 120 murdered or seriously maimed slaves"; Tennessee in 1856, where "some fifty-six blacks were hanged"; and Texas in 1860, where he accepts a vigilante's count of "ten whites and sixty-five blacks."³⁷ Those tolls were run up over weeks and across many places.
• Against that scale, Hawn's Mill killed seventeen Latter-day Saints in an afternoon. It belongs with the worst mob killings of the era, and the Saints were its victims. Mountain Meadows killed about one hundred twenty. That is more than five times Louisville. It is about as many as the worst insurrection panic killed or maimed, and it was done at one place in one afternoon.

So Mason's point about frequency should be conceded, and so should the essay's point about frontier vigilantism.  Neither accounts for Mountain Meadows.  A community whose violence was otherwise ordinary in kind and rare in number produced the largest single killing in this whole record.  Something other than frequency has to explain that.

What stands out is the structure.  Three features distinguish this case from a generic frontier story:

1. A living prophet claiming present revelation, so that a leader's rhetorical excess arrived with more than rhetorical weight.
2. Fused civil, ecclesiastical, and military authority. Haight was mayor, militia major, and stake president at once. Dame was militia commander and stake president. Brigham Young was Church president, territorial governor, and superintendent of Indian Affairs.
3. Geographic isolation, which removed every external check on that fusion for a decade.

Mountain Meadows required all three.  The Missouri and Illinois episodes had the first and part of the second but not the third, and the violence there stayed at the level of raids, threats, and expulsion.

This is not only a critic's reading.  The three Church historians who wrote Massacre at Mountain Meadows reach for the same explanation.  From the scholarship on group violence they list what is usually present when ordinary people kill:  "an atmosphere of authority and obedience, which allows errant leaders to trump the moral instincts of their followers."  They conclude:  "The conditions for mass killing—demonizing, authority, obedience, peer pressure, ambiguity, fear, and deprivation—all were present in southern Utah in 1857."³²  And of Cedar City in the first week of September they write that "the typical components for group violence existed," including "a concentration of authority."³²  They also name the irony:  "some of the people who had long deplored the injustice of extralegal violence became its perpetrators."³²

Where this argument is weak.  Three limits should be stated.

First, it rests on one case.  One massacre cannot prove a general law about fused authority.  The Missouri and Illinois contrast is suggestive and no more.

Second, the same structure nearly prevented the killing.  Dame's council voted twice to let the emigrants go.  The Cedar City council insisted on asking Brigham Young, and his answer was to leave them alone.  When the hierarchy was consulted, it said no.  The massacre happened because local leaders acted before the answer came and went around their own councils.  A fair statement is that fused office gave a few men the power to call out a militia on Church authority, and that the only brakes were inside the same system and were too slow.

Third, the comparison class cuts against the argument in part, and it is not fully documented here.  Grimsted's book was read in passages, not whole.  His insurrection panics show that American communities with no fusion of church and civil office killed their neighbors by the dozens when they believed an enemy was among them.  Texas in 1860, where at least seventy-five died, had poisoned-well rumors of its own.  What those cases share with southern Utah in 1857 is fear of an enemy and the absence of any authority willing to stop the killing.  They do not share the fused offices.  So the comparison supports the fear and the isolation as causes more firmly than it supports the fusion.  Nor has this article compared Mountain Meadows with the mass killings of Native people by troops and settlers in the same years, which were larger and more frequent.  Turley and Brown name one in Utah itself:  at Bear River in January 1863 United States troops "slaughtered hundreds of men, women, and children," in what the authors call "the significantly larger Bear River Massacre."³³  Against that record the Saints' violence toward Utes and Paiutes looks like the American norm, which is no defense of it.

A Christian site must be honest about its own tradition.  Christians organized crusades, burned Anabaptists and Servetus, sacked Constantinople, and blessed conquests and slave systems.  Anyone who reads this article as evidence that Mormonism is uniquely violent has read it badly.  The argument is not about which tradition is bloodier.  It is that the specific arrangement Mormonism built in the nineteenth century, revelation plus fused office plus isolation, is a known accelerant, and that it did in fact accelerate.

The strongest Latter-day Saint responses

Five responses deserve an answer.  Each is quoted from its own source first.

1. The Church's 2016 essay: a subset of frontier violence

The Gospel Topics essay "Peace and Violence among 19th-Century Latter-day Saints" is the current official treatment.  Its thesis is one sentence:  "The isolated acts of violence committed by some Latter-day Saints can generally be seen as a subset of the broader phenomenon of frontier violence in 19th-century America."³  It supports that with the militia law of 1792 and the American habit of vigilantism.  It treats the preaching of 1856 as a species of revival language:  "Nineteenth-century Americans were accustomed to violent language, both religious and otherwise. …  At times during the reformation, President Young, his counselor Jedediah M. Grant, and other leaders preached with fiery rhetoric, warning against the evils of those who dissented from or opposed the Church."³  And it closes on proportion:

Many people in the 19th century unjustly characterized the Latter-day Saints as a violent people.  Yet the vast majority of Latter-day Saints, in the 19th century as today, lived in peace with their neighbors and families, and sought peace in their communities. …  Nevertheless, the actions of relatively few Latter-day Saints caused death and injury, frayed community relationships, and damaged the perception of Latter-day Saints as a peaceful people.³

What should be conceded:  nearly all of it.  The vast majority did live in peace.  The frontier pattern is real, and Grimsted's 1,218 riots show it.  So does the scale:  other American communities killed on something like the scale of Mountain Meadows.  The essay names the Danites, the burned towns, the blood-atonement preaching, the unpunished killings and the massacre.  An institution that wanted to hide this record would not have written it.

The answer is narrow and concerns two words.

"Isolated."  The essay's own account of Mountain Meadows says the attackers were "a branch of the territorial militia in southern Utah (composed entirely of Latter-day Saints)."³  A militia called out by a man who was mayor, major and stake president, on a decision argued in two councils, is an act of local institutions.  It is not an isolated act by some members.

"Subset."  This word is harder to answer than an earlier version of this article claimed.  The deadliest political riot Grimsted records killed twenty-two, and Mountain Meadows killed about one hundred twenty.  But riots are not the whole of frontier violence.  Grimsted's own insurrection panics killed seventy-five in Texas in 1860 and killed or maimed a hundred or more in Virginia in 1831, and United States troops killed hundreds of Shoshone at Bear River in 1863.³⁷³³  Mountain Meadows sits near the top of that range.  It does not stand outside it.  What the word still hides is who did it:  not a mob that formed and dissolved, but a militia under its own officers.

On the preaching, the comparison with revivalists fails at one point.  A revival preacher who spoke of blood did not also command the militia and appoint the judges.  And Young told his hearers he was not using a figure:  "the law is precisely the same."²⁹

2. The two Oxford volumes: local leaders decided

The fullest faithful scholarship is Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2008) and Vengeance Is Mine (2023).  Henry B. Eyring gave the first book's findings in 2007 as the Church's own:

Two of the significant conclusions they have reached are (1) that the message conveying the will and intent of Brigham Young not to interfere with the immigrants arrived too late, and (2) that the responsibility for the massacre lies with local leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the regions near Mountain Meadows who also held civic and military positions and with members of the Church acting under their direction.³⁸

He added:  "Although they are Church employees, the authors have retained full editorial control and have drawn their own conclusions from the exhaustive body of historical material they assembled."³⁸  Turley and Brown describe what the Church gave them:  "unfettered access to its previously restricted massacre-related sources and funding for researchers to scour archives and other sources across the United States."³³

What should be conceded:  both conclusions, and the quality of the work.  The books print evidence against the Church's interest on many of the pages seen for this article.  No critic has produced a document that overturns either finding.

The answer is that the books say more than the summary of them.  Eyring's second conclusion puts the responsibility on local leaders.  The authors' own preface spreads it wider:  "We believe errors were made by U.S. president James Buchanan, Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders, some of the Arkansas emigrants, some Paiutes, and most of all by settlers in southern Utah."³²  On the Reformation they write that "the tough talk about blood atonement and dissenters must have helped create a climate of violence in the territory, especially among those who chose to take license from it."³²  On Cedar City they name "a concentration of authority" among the causes.³²  And the second book says Young may have read the massacre as "a consequence of his wartime leadership."³³

So the Oxford volumes do not rebut this article's fifth proposition.  They are its best evidence.  Their finding that local men decided is true.  It is also what the structural claim predicts:  the men who decided could do so because each of them held Church, civil and military office together.  "Local leaders … who also held civic and military positions" is Eyring's phrase, and it is the whole point.

3. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism: blood atonement was voluntary and rhetorical

Lowell M. Snow's entry in the 1992 Encyclopedia of Mormonism is the standard reply on blood atonement.  It says the idea belonged to "a complete theocracy," that "the practical effect of the idea was its use as a rhetorical device," and that "this view is not a doctrine of the Church and has never been practiced by the Church at any time."³¹  Its sharpest point is against the critics:

Early anti-Mormon writers charged that under Brigham Young the Church practiced "blood Atonement," by which they meant Church-instigated violence directed at dissenters, enemies, and strangers.  This claim distorted the whole idea of blood atonement-which was based on voluntary submission by an offender-into a supposed justification of involuntary punishment.³¹

What should be conceded:  the present status, completely.  No current Latter-day Saint teaching includes this.  The institutional point too:  there is no evidence the Church ran executions.  And the voluntary element is really in the sermons.  In September 1856 Young spoke of sinners who "would be perfectly willing to have their blood spilt" and of men who came "and offer their lives."²⁹

The answer is that the sermons do not stay inside that limit.  Five months later Young put the knife in the neighbor's hand:  "if he wants salvation and it is necessary to spill his blood on the earth in order that he may be saved, spill it."³⁰  And he spoke of "plenty of instances where men have been righteously slain, in order to atone for their sins."³⁰  A man who is "righteously slain" by others has not volunteered.  The entry also limits the teaching to murderers.  Grant's sermon addressed "you who have committed sins that cannot be forgiven through baptism," which is wider.²⁸

"Rhetorical device" has the same problem as in the 2016 essay.  The Church's own later writers concede the effect.  The essay says the rhetoric "may have led these Latter-day Saints to believe that such actions were justified."³  The 2008 volume says it "must have helped create a climate of violence."³²  A device that leads hearers to think killing is justified has stopped being only a device.

4. Mason: the instances can be counted

Patrick Mason's argument was stated above:  "The remarkable fact that historians can name virtually every instance of violence by church members against their opponents in the movement's early decades suggests the relative infrequence of such episodes."⁸

What should be conceded:  the argument is sound and this article accepts it.  A phenomenon that can be listed is small.  The list is short:  the Danite expulsions, the Daviess County raids, Crooked River, the Expositor, a handful of killings in the 1850s, Mountain Meadows, and the killings of Utes and Paiutes.  Against it stands a longer list of what was done to the Saints.

Three things limit how far the argument goes, and Mason states the first two himself.  Frequency is not gravity:  the same book calls the 1850s "the most lethal decade in Latter-day Saint history."⁸  Frequency is not cause:  Mason writes of violence that leaders "selectively embraced" as "a legitimate method of building the kingdom of God."⁸  And the sentence covers violence against "opponents."  Whether the Utes at Nephi and the Paiutes at Circleville count as opponents is doubtful, and those killings are less completely recorded than the rest.  Winkler says of Circleville that the count is a "minimum possible figure."⁵

5. Eyring in 2007: an inexcusable departure

On 11 September 2007, at the Meadows, Henry B. Eyring spoke "by assignment, on behalf of the First Presidency."³⁸  Its central passage has been quoted above:  what was done "represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct."³  The statement went on:

We express profound regret for the massacre carried out in this valley 150 years ago today and for the undue and untold suffering experienced by the victims then and by their relatives to the present time.

A separate expression of regret is owed to the Paiute people who have unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the massacre.  Although the extent of their involvement is disputed, it is believed they would not have participated without the direction and stimulus provided by local Church leaders and members.³⁸

What should be conceded:  this is unqualified on the act.  It names members of the Church as the killers.  It calls the killing inexcusable.  It clears the Paiutes of the principal blame after a hundred and fifty years.  Many Christian bodies have said less about their own worst acts, and this article does not minimize it.

Two observations remain, and neither is a complaint about tone.  The word the statement uses is "regret."  And it places the responsibility on "local leaders," as the 2008 book's summary did.  It does not speak to what the institution did afterward:  the 1858 report in the Historian's Office that blamed "vengeful Indians," or the thirteen years before any Church court cut a participant off.  Those belong to the second Oxford volume, published sixteen years later.  A statement made today could say more because the Church's own historians have since found more.

Common objections and responses

Nine objections follow.  Some come from defenders of the Saints and some from critics.  Each is given in the words of a named source where one exists.

"The extermination order proves the Saints were pure victims"

Joseph Smith's 1843 Appeal puts the claim at full strength:  "Missouri has robbed and mob[b]ed me and twelve or fifteen thousand innocent inhabitants, murdered hundreds, and expelled the residue, at the point of the bayonet, without law."¹³

The order proves that a state ordered a religious minority driven out or killed.  That is not in dispute.  It does not establish that the Saints did nothing in 1838.  Four things precede it.  The Danite letter of June told five dissenters that "a more fatal calamity shall befall you."¹  Rigdon's oration of 4 July promised "a war of extermination."¹⁵  In October Latter-day Saint companies raided Gallatin and Millport.  The Church's essay says so plainly:  "Latter-day Saint vigilantes, including many Danites, raided two towns believed to be centers of opposition activity, burning homes and stealing goods."³  And a man who rode with them said the same.  Ebenezer Robinson, writing in 1889, recalled that Missourians' houses were "fired by the hands of some of those who had pledged to 'carry the seat of war to their own houses,' &c."¹⁷

"Innocent inhabitants" is true of nearly all the eight thousand who were driven out in winter.  It is not true of every armed man among them.  "Murdered hundreds" is also more than the record supports.  The Church's own accounts count seventeen killed at Hawn's Mill and a few more elsewhere.²  The honest statement is that the Saints were the victims of the larger crime and the authors of smaller ones.

"Rigdon's July 4 speech caused the extermination order"

Ebenezer Robinson made this argument from inside:  "This oration, and the stand taken by the church in endorsing it, and its publication, undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence in arousing the people of the whole upper Missouri country."¹⁷

"Influence" is fair.  "Caused" is too strong.  Nearly four months and five events lie between the speech and the order:  the election fight at Gallatin, the visit to Adam Black, the siege of De Witt, the Daviess County raids, and Crooked River.  Boggs's order answers reports of Crooked River, not a pamphlet.  And the Missourians needed no lesson in the vocabulary.  On 4 October, three weeks before the order, General Lucas was writing to the governor that "those base and degraded beings will be exterminated from the face of the earth."¹  The speech belongs to the escalation.  It is not the cause.

"The Danites were Joseph Smith's assassination squad"

Sampson Avard swore to the first half of this in 1838:  "I consider Joseph Smith, jr., as the prime mover and organizer of this Danite band."¹  Popular fiction supplied the rest.  Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, in 1887, told readers:  "To this day, in the lonely ranches of the West, the name of the Danite Band, or the Avenging Angels, is a sinister and an ill-omened one."³⁹

Retire this.  Avard was an interested witness who admitted that "the witness does not know that they ever took the Danite oath."¹  No assassination by the Danites is recorded in any source used here.  The body lasted five months in two counties.  The Church's summary is fair:  it "resulted in a longstanding and much-embellished myth about a secret society of Latter-day Saint vigilantes."³  What survives is an intimidation society whose expulsion letter was drafted by a member of the First Presidency.

"The Danites are a hostile invention"

The oldest form of this objection is Joseph Smith's own defense, written from jail on 16 December 1838:  the Danites were Avard's private scheme.  He said that Avard had taught "many false and pernicious things" as if they came from the Presidency, things "which the presidency never knew of being taught in the church by any body untill after they were made prisoners, which if they had known of, they would have spurned them and their authors from them as they would the gates of hell."⁴⁰

Also retire this, in its strong form.  The society, the oath, the organization into tens and fifties, and the eighty-three-signature letter are attested by witnesses other than Avard.¹  Smith's letter is an interested statement too.  Its author was in jail after a hearing at which Avard had been the state's lead witness.  Against it stand three things.  John Corrill, who was not Avard's ally, testified that "Dr. Avard's teaching in the Danite society proceeded from the presidency."¹  The expulsion letter carried eighty-three signatures and, by Avard's account, Rigdon's draft.¹  And David Whitmer, one of the men that letter drove out, said in 1885 that Smith and Rigdon "organized the Danites by which each member was sworn to sustain the Heads of the church whether right or wrong."⁴¹  Whitmer's statement is forty-seven years late and is hearsay on the oath.  He says he learned of it from Phelps, Corrill and one other.  It still matches Avard's phrase "right or wrong" from an opposite direction.¹

The Church no longer makes the strong claim.  Its essay says that "some leaders and members organized a paramilitary group known as the Danites" and that "Danites intimidated Church dissenters."³  Smith may well not have known what Avard taught in every meeting.  He knew the society existed, and his counselor drafted its most important document.

"Destroying the Expositor was simple tyranny"

Governor Ford said so in the strongest terms:  "It was altogether the most curious and irregular trial that ever was recorded in any civilized country; and one finds difficulty in determining whether the proceedings of the council were more the result of insanity or depravity."¹⁹

Too strong.  The council was neither insane nor lawless.  It had a charter power to "declare what shall be a nuisance, and to prevent and remove the same."¹⁸  It read the leading law book of the day, and that book's note says that "a libellous print or paper, affecting a private individual, may be destroyed."²⁴  The First Amendment did not bind a city in 1844.²³  In the same state, seven years earlier, a mob had destroyed three presses and killed an editor, and nobody called that a trial at all.³⁷

What the council got wrong is narrower and is enough.  It destroyed the press and not only the papers.  It gave the owners no notice and no hearing.  It rejected Warrington's proposal of a warning and a fine.  It ignored Chitty's "safer course," which was a magistrate.  And it did the one thing Blackstone says destroys the liberty of the press, which is to lay "previous restraints upon publications."²⁴  The Church's own summary is the right verdict:  the council "acted legally to destroy copies of the newspaper but may have exceeded its authority by destroying the press itself."²³

"Brigham Young ordered Mountain Meadows"

Two sources carry this charge.  The first is John D. Lee's posthumous Mormonism Unveiled (1877):  "I have always believed, since that day, that General George A. Smith was then visiting Southern Utah to prepare the people for the work of exterminating Captain Fancher's train of emigrants, and I now believe that he was sent for that purpose by the direct command of Brigham Young."⁴²  The second is Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets (2002), which ends:  "He knew the full truth of his complicity in the crime."  Young, Bagley writes, "initiated the sequence of events that led to the betrayal and murder of one hundred twenty men, women, and children."⁴³

Not supported.  Young's letter of 10 September says "You must not meddle with them," and it was written before he could have known the outcome.⁶  Haight wept when he read it.  Lee's sentence is a belief, stated twice as a belief, in a book edited and published by his attorney after his death.  Turley and Brown, who compared the versions of Lee's confession, report what he said while alive:  "If I was to make forty confessions," Lee avowed, "I could not implicate Brigham Young."  They add that Lee "was willing to testify against his co-conspirators but not Young."³³  A condemned man who could have bought his life with that testimony did not give it.

Bagley's wording is more careful than the popular version of it.  "Initiated the sequence of events" is not "ordered."  Part of what stands behind it is now common ground.  Turley and Brown accept that Young had a "strategy of encouraging Indian cattle raids during the Utah War."³³  That policy put emigrant property at risk on the southern road in the very weeks the Fancher company used it.  It is a serious charge against Young as governor.  It is not an order to kill a wagon train, and no document seen for this article is one.

"The Church has never faced Mountain Meadows"

Bagley wrote in 2002:  "The modern LDS church wishes the world to simply forget the most disturbing episode in its history."⁴³  Juanita Brooks, a believing Latter-day Saint whose own book on the massacre appeared in 1950, had said the same of her own people:  "we have tried to blot out the affair from our history."³³

This was fair when it was written and is false now.  The Church's own historians date the change.  The 2008 volume, Turley and Brown write, "was a turning point, marking the first time that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints encouraged its historians to publicly lay bare this shameful episode in its history."³³  The first time was a hundred and fifty-one years after the event.  Brooks's book, they note, got from Church authorities no "official condemnation" and no "recognition" either.

Since 2007 the record is different.  The Church opened its archives, paid for the research, let Oxford publish it, said at the site that the killing was "inexcusable," expressed regret to the victims' families and to the Paiutes, and wrote the massacre into its official essays.³⁸  A critic who repeats the 2002 sentence today is out of date.

"Blood atonement was carried out on a large scale"

Robert Baskin, prosecuting Lee in 1875, told the jury it seemed to him "that a part of the Mormon Religion is to kill."³³  A shelf of nineteenth-century exposés said the same.

Not supported.  No source used here documents an institutional program of killing sinners, and the Church's essay is right that "many allegations of such violence are unfounded."³

The defensible claim is narrower and still serious.  The same essay grants that "a few Latter-day Saints committed other violent acts against a small number of dissenters and outsiders" and that "the perpetrators of these crimes were generally not punished."³  The 2008 Oxford volume gives an example in its notes.  At Payson in 1858 a man named Henry Jones, accused of adultery and incest, was castrated, and he and his mother were later killed on suspicion of planning to steal horses.  A local diarist "did 'not pretend to justify' the murders."³²  That is one case, not a system.  It is also what the sermons of 1856 would lead a reader to expect in a town where bishop and magistrate were the same men.

"Blood atonement was just rhetoric, so it does not matter"

The Encyclopedia of Mormonism says "the practical effect of the idea was its use as a rhetorical device."³¹

Insufficient.  It was taught from the pulpit by the President of the Church as a law of God his hearers had failed to understand:  "the law is precisely the same."²⁹  It was taught during a campaign he ordered, by the man who was also governor.  And the Church's own historians now grant the effect.  The preaching "must have helped create a climate of violence in the territory, especially among those who chose to take license from it."³²  Rhetoric that helps create a climate of violence, in which killings then happen and go unpunished, matters.  The 1992 answer settles what the Church teaches today.  It does not settle what its President taught in 1856 or what followed.

What evidence would change the conclusion?

The article reaches five verdicts.  Each could be moved by evidence of a particular kind.

What would strengthen the Latter-day Saint case.

• A contemporary document showing Church leaders in Salt Lake City moving to punish the Mountain Meadows perpetrators before 1870. The pages of Vengeance Is Mine seen for this article show two Church hearings in August 1858 that disciplined no one for the massacre, the Cedar City leaders dropped from office in 1859, an offer of help to the courts in 1859, a private rebuke of Lee in 1863, and excommunications in 1870. A Church court that tried the massacre itself and disciplined a participant before 1870 would change the third and fourth findings on the cover-up.
• Evidence that Brigham Young pressed for the truth between 1858 and 1870 and was deceived again. The pages seen show Lee still telling him the Indian story in 1863 and Young refusing it. They do not show what Young did with what George A. Smith and Hamblin told him in 1858 and 1859. Evidence that he was misled by men he trusted in those years would shorten the period of inaction.
• Evidence that the First Presidency repudiated the Danite letter of June 1838 at the time. Joseph Smith's letter of December 1838 disowns Avard's teaching. It does not disown the expulsion of Cowdery and the Whitmers.
• A comparison showing that American communities without fused church and civil office produced killings of emigrants or neighbors on the scale of Mountain Meadows. Grimsted's catalogue has cases near that size, and they have already weakened the structural claim: the insurrection panics of Virginia in 1831 and Texas in 1860. They were spread over weeks and many places. A single killing of a hundred people in a day by such a community would weaken it further.
• A full reading of Mason's book showing that his count of episodes includes the killings of Native people and still comes out small. Axelgard reports that Mason's chapter on the 1850s "touches on an extermination campaign against Ute warriors and atrocities against Paiute men, women, and children," so the book does treat them. How Mason counts them was not seen.

What would strengthen the case against.

• Any contemporary document placing Brigham Young's approval before 11 September 1857, or evidence that the express rider carried a different message than the one preserved. Either would reverse the fourth verdict.
• Documentation that leaders in Salt Lake City knew of white participation in 1857 and suppressed it. Woodruff's journal for 29 September records the Indian story. A second contemporary record of that meeting saying otherwise would be decisive.
• Proof that the 1858 report to the Historian's Office was written by men who knew it was false. Turley and Brown call it a paper of "half-truths." Whether George A. Smith knew the truth when he signed it is the question. The pages seen show doubt and not knowledge: eleven days later he wrote Young that white men were reported on the ground, "but … whether indeed they were there at all, I have not learned." They also show him still giving the Indian story to an outsider in 1869.
• A demonstration that a specific killing was carried out on explicit blood-atonement instruction from a general Church leader. None is known.
• A higher and better-documented toll for Circleville, or evidence that the militia command ordered the killing.

The single most useful step is a complete reading of Vengeance Is Mine.  About eighty of its pages were read here as page images and the rest only in search results.  Some pages Google Books does not show at all.  Among them are 148 to 150 and 154, on the Church hearings of 1858, and 244, 246, 249, 251, 253, 254, 284 and 285, which the book's index cites for Young's dealings with the perpetrators after 1863:  what Erastus Snow, Lorenzo Roundy and Nephi Johnson told him in 1870, his advice to Lee to move south, and Haight's later rebaptism.  The four findings on the cover-up are stated with that limit.  The first two are unlikely to move.  The third and fourth could.

What was read and what was not

Every quotation in this article was checked word for word against a source opened for it.  The checks were made on 8 August 2026 for the first draft and on 1 October 2026 for the sections added since.  The ledger is in quotes.md, and literature-review.md records what each source is and how it was reached.

Read in full or in the full passage cited:  the 1841 Missouri Document; Rigdon's 1838 oration; the Joseph Smith Papers texts of the Nauvoo charter, the city council's rough minutes of 10 June 1844, the 1839 Van Buren letter, the 1838 and 1839 jail letters, the 1843 Appeal, and the 1844 platform; Blackstone's Commentaries in the New York edition with Chitty's notes; Ford's History of Illinois; Ebenezer Robinson's 1889 recollections in The Return; Kane's 1850 discourse; the three Journal of Discourses sermons; Lee's 1877 Mormonism Unveiled at the page cited; the Church's essay, history topics, 2007 Ensign article and 2007 statement; the Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry; Saunders on the Nauvoo Legion; Winkler and Reeve on Circleville; Alexander on the Walker War; and the Paiute inscriptions at Circleville.

Read in part:  Walker, Turley and Leonard's Massacre at Mountain Meadows (2008), Bagley's Blood of the Prophets (2002), and Grimsted's American Mobbing (1998) were read in paragraphs through the Internet Archive's search of copies that cannot be borrowed.  Turley and Brown's Vengeance Is Mine (2023) was read through the pages Google Books displays, about eighty of them, and through its search results.  Page numbers for all four were checked against the books' own page maps or running heads, and the footnotes say how.

Not obtained:  Patrick Q. Mason's Mormonism and Violence (2019).  It is quoted only through Frederick W. Axelgard's review, which gives page numbers from the Kindle edition.  Also not obtained:  Dallin H. Oaks's 1965 Utah Law Review article on the Expositor, on which the Church's sentence about the press rests; the published version of the 10 June 1844 minutes in the Nauvoo Neighbor; and Culmsee's 1973 book on the Black Hawk War.  The Journal of Discourses sermons still rest on the Wikisource transcription, with one passage checked against a page scan.

Sources