11 September will for most who witnessed the tragic events in New York stay indelibly in their minds. However there are those who now want to ensure that we do not forget another 11 September this time in 1857. This was the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Chris Armstrong of Christianity Today recently posted an article on the subject in which he says:
“On September 11, 1857, 120 ‘gentiles’ were slaughtered by Mormon malcontents in an impoverished, remote section of Utah. The Mountain Meadows massacre has been called “one of the worst mass murders in American history.”
“Though details of the event are vague and no eyewitness wholly trustworthy, the consensus of recent historical study and dramatic treatment supports the outline of the story as Mark Twain told it in his Roughing It:
“A large party of Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and made an attack. But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses of their wagons, and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for five days! … At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy. They retired to the upper end of the ‘Meadows,’resumed civilized apparel, washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce! When the emigrants saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with cheer after cheer… and were promptly slaughtered en masse, excepting only a few of the many children—those under the age of seven—deemed too young to ‘tell tales.'”
The full article is worth reading from the link above
Interestingly on 6 September 2003 the Daily Telegraph carried a review of a new book entitled “American Massacre: The Tragedy of Mountain Meadows, September 11 1857”. The review is also under the tile, “The Forgotten Massacre of September 11” and in part we read:
“Anyone reading Sally Denton’s investigation will be asking: how could this tragedy, more horrible in every way than Custer’s last Stand, have been reduced to an historical footnote?”
Mormons of course seek to wriggle of the hook because no one can quite prove that Brigham Young ordered the massacre of these 120 innocent people. Yet this just will not go away and the recent events of 11 September seem to have brought the matter back into focus again.
