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Criticisms of Brigham Young

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Articles about Brigham Young

Teachings	Creation President of US? Adam-God theory Moon inhabited by Quakers? Words as scripture Science and education Word of Wisdom Need to know for ourselves Total submission to him?
History	1844 Succession to Joseph Smith Disagreements with Emma Smith Divine manifestations Freemasonry Lucy Mack Smith's Biography of Joseph Smith *Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre The 'Mormon Reformation'
Race	Brigham Young's statements regarding race
Critics	Fabricated quotes from Brigham Young Quote mining JoD 13:95 Not witness of Christ? Reviews of books about Brigham Young

We warn you against the dissemination of doctrines which are not according to the Scriptures and which are alleged to have been taught by some of the General Authorities of past generations. Such, for instance, is the Adam-God theory. We denounce that theory and hope that everyone will be cautioned against this and other kinds of false doctrine.

—Spencer W. Kimball, "Our Own Liahona," Ensign (November 1976), 77.off-site

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What is the Adam-God Theory?

Brigham Young taught that Adam, the first man, was God the Father

Brigham Young taught that Adam, the first man, was God the Father. Since this teaching runs counter to the story told in Genesis and commonly accepted by Christians, critics accuse Brigham of being a false prophet. Also, because modern Latter-day Saints do not believe Brigham's "Adam-God" teachings, critics accuse Mormons of either changing their teachings or rejecting teachings of prophets they find uncomfortable or unsupportable.

Brigham never developed the teaching into something that could be reconciled with LDS scripture and presented as official doctrine

Brigham Young appears to have believed and taught Adam-God, but he never developed the teaching into something that could be reconciled with LDS scripture and presented as official doctrine. Therefore, we simply don't know what Brigham Young meant, and modern leaders have warned us about accepting traditional explanations of Adam-God. Since the Church has rejected it, we won't be able to answer the question until the Lord sees fit to reveal more about it.

The Church's official position is that Adam-God is not the doctrine of the Church

Regardless of which approach the reader prefers to accept, the Church's official position on Adam-God is clear: as popularly understood, Adam-God (i.e., "Adam, the first man, was identical with Elohim/God the Father") is not the doctrine of the Church. If there are any particles of truth to anything surrounding the Adam-God doctrine, one would expect those things to harmonize with what has already been revealed. Only further revelation from the Lord's anointed would be able to clear up many points surrounding that doctrine.

What is the history of Brigham Young's Adam-God Theory and why was it rejected by the Church?

Origins

Brigham Young gave over 1,500 sermons that were recorded by transcribers. Over 500 of these can be read online. Many of these were published in the Journal of Discourses, the Deseret Evening News, and other Church publications. In 20 of these sermons he brought up the subject of God the Father's relationship to Adam. He also brought up the subject in private meetings. Nine accounts record him bringing up issues related to Adam-God to different individuals. Many of his comments fit easily into current LDS doctrine, while some have engendered controversy.

He made the best known, and probably earliest, controversial statement in a sermon given on 9 April 1852:

Now hear it, O inhabitants of the earth, Jew and Gentile, Saint and sinner! When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize this world. He is MICHAEL, the Archangel, the ANCIENT OF DAYS! about whom holy men have written and spoken—He is our FATHER and our GOD, and the only God with whom WE have to do. Every man upon the earth, professing Christians or non-professing, must hear it, and will know it sooner or later. They came here, organized the raw material, and arranged in their order the herbs of the field, the trees, the apple, the peach, the plum, the pear, and every other fruit that is desirable and good for man; the seed was brought from another sphere, and planted in this earth. The thistle, the thorn, the brier, and the obnoxious weed did not appear until after the earth was cursed. When Adam and Eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit, their bodies became mortal from its effects, and therefore their offspring were mortal.

Based on these remarks, and others he made in public and in private, it is apparent that Brigham Young believed that:

• Adam lived on another planet, died, and was resurrected. Adam united with Eve at some point.
• Adam was the father of the spirits of mankind, as well as being the first parent of our physical bodies.
• Adam and Eve came to this earth as resurrected, exalted personages.
• Adam and Eve fell and became mortal in order to create physical bodies for their spirit children.
• Adam was the spiritual and physical father of Jesus Christ.

Brigham claimed to have received these beliefs by revelation. Though it is not understood entirely what Brigham meant by "revelation." Matthew Brown in his 2009 FairMormon Conference presentation presented evidence that complicates our picture of what Brigham meant:

We now turn to a pertinent apologetic issue. Critics enjoy pointing out that on several occasions Brigham Young claimed that his teachings on Adam came to him through revelation. Since this section of this paper is dealing with ‘perspectives’ it is only proper that President Young be allowed to provide an idea of what he thought about, and how he experienced, the revelatory process. First of all, the question will be posed: ‘How did Brother Brigham compare himself, as a revelator, with his predecessor?’ There are two quotations that are of interest here. The second President of the LDS Church said, "I wish to ask every member of this whole community if they ever heard [me] profess to be a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator as Joseph Smith was. [I] professed to be an apostle of Jesus Christ." In the second quote Brigham Young says that he "did not receive [revelations] through the Urim and Thummim as Joseph [Smith] did." Hence, it can be ascertained that, at least in one sense, Brigham Young did not receive communications from heaven in the same direct manner that Joseph Smith did. And it is relevant to mention here that Brigham Young did, in fact, own a seerstone that was once utilized by Joseph Smith.

Next, there is this lengthy quote from President Young which is well worth considering in its entirety. He rhetorically asked himself,

Well, Brother Brigham, . . . . have you had revelations?" Yes, I have them all the time. I live constantly by the principle of revelation. . . . I have never received one particle of intelligence [except] by revelation, no matter whether [my] father or mother revealed it, or my sister, or [my] neighbor. No person receives knowledge [except] upon the principle of revelation, that is, by having something revealed to them. "Do you [Brother Brigham] have the revelations of the Lord Jesus Christ?" I will leave that for others to judge. If the Lord requires anything of this people, and speaks through me, I will tell them of it; but if He does not, still we all live by the principle of revelation. Who reveals? Everybody around us; we learn [from] each other. I have something which you have not, and you have something which I have not. I reveal what I have to you, and you reveal what you have to me. I believe that we are revelators to each other.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that the ‘revelation’ claims for Adam–God ideology did not originate with Brigham Young, but rather with his close friend and associate Heber C. Kimball. There is one well-documented instance where Brother Kimball claimed that some of the concepts connected with the Adam–God Theory were revealed to him. There are also two other statements that need to be taken into careful consideration. The first comes from Thomas Stenhouse’s book. It reads: "Brother Heber had considerable pride in relating to his intimate friends that he was the source of Brigham’s revelation on the ‘Adam deity.’"

Since Mr. Stenhouse was an apostate from Mormonism at the time he wrote this, some people might tend to discount his assertion. But the second statement seems to lend credence to it. This one comes from Elder Orson Pratt. He said that the notion of "Adam being our Father and our God . . .[was] advanced by Bro[ther] Kimball in the stand [or at the pulpit], and afterwards approved by

Bro[ther] Brigham."

On at least three occasions, Brigham claimed that he learned it from Joseph Smith. While this doctrine was never canonized, Brigham expected other contemporary Church leaders to accept it, or at least not preach against it. (Orson Pratt did not believe it, and he and Brigham had a number of heated conversations on the subject.)

The historical record indicates that some contemporary Latter-day Saints took Brigham's teachings at face value and attempted to incorporate the doctrine into mainstream LDS teachings. This response was far from universal, however, and lost steam after the turn of the 20th century.

Adam-God was eventually incorporated into the teaching of some 20th century polygamous break-off sects, who consider it a doctrine whose absence in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is proof that the Church is in apostasy.

Rejection of Adam-God by the LDS Church

As far as can be determined, none of Brigham Young's successors in the presidency of the Church continued this teaching in public, and by the presidency of Joseph F. Smith (1901–18) there were active moves to censure small groups that taught Adam-God.

One of the earliest statements from the Church rejecting Adam-God teachings was made by Charles W. Penrose in 1902:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never formulated or adopted any theory concerning the subject treated upon by President Young as to Adam.

In October 1976 general conference, Spencer W. Kimball declared the Church's official position on Adam-God:

We warn you against the dissemination of doctrines which are not according to the Scriptures and which are alleged to have been taught by some of the General Authorities of past generations. Such, for instance, is the Adam-God theory. We denounce that theory and hope that everyone will be cautioned against this and other kinds of false doctrine.

Stephen E. Robinson: "Yet another way in which anti-Mormon critics often misrepresent LDS doctrine is in the presentation of anomalies as though they were the doctrine of the Church"

BYU professor Stephen E. Robinson wrote:

Yet another way in which anti-Mormon critics often misrepresent LDS doctrine is in the presentation of anomalies as though they were the doctrine of the Church. Anomalies occur in every field of human endeavor, even in science. An anomaly is something unexpected that cannot be explained by the existing laws or theories, but which does not constitute evidence for changing the laws and theories. An anomaly is a glitch.... A classic example of an anomaly in the LDS tradition is the so-called "Adam-God theory." During the latter half of the nineteenth century Brigham Young made some remarks about the relationship between Adam and God that the Latter-day Saints have never been able to understand. The reported statements conflict with LDS teachings before and after Brigham Young, as well as with statements of President Young himself during the same period of time. So how do Latter-day Saints deal with the phenomenon? We don't; we simply set it aside. It is an anomaly. On occasion my colleagues and I at Brigham Young University have tried to figure out what Brigham Young might have actually said and what it might have meant, but the attempts have always failed. The reported statements simply do not compute—we cannot make sense out of them. This is not a matter of believing it or disbelieving it; we simply don't know what "it" is. If Brigham Young were here we could ask him what he actually said and what he meant by it, but he is not here.... For the Latter-day Saints, however, the point is moot, since whatever Brigham Young said, true or false, was never presented to the Church for a sustaining vote. It was not then and is not now a doctrine of the Church, and...the Church has merely set the phenomenon aside as an anomaly.

Matthew Brown gave (2009): "Brigham Young repeated these ideas and expounded upon them during the next 25 years. His viewpoints have been variously classified as doctrine, theory, paradox, heresy, speculation, and some of the mysteries"

Matthew Brown gave perhaps one of the best reconcilations of Adam-God at the 2009 FairMormon Conference:

On the 9th of April 1852 President Brigham Young stepped up to the pulpit in the old tabernacle on Temple Square and informed a group of Elders, who had gathered there for General Conference, that he was going to straighten them out on an issue which they had been debating about. The topic of disagreement centered upon who was the Father of Jesus Christ in the flesh—Elohim or the Holy Ghost. President Young surprised the people who were in attendance by announcing that it was neither one of them....Brigham Young repeated these ideas and expounded upon them during the next 25 years. His viewpoints have been variously classified as doctrine, theory, paradox, heresy, speculation, and some of the mysteries.—(Click here to continue)

If the Adam-God doctrine isn't true, how come D&C 27:11 calls Adam the Ancient of Days which is clearly a title for God in Daniel 7?

The real question should be how does one justify their interpretation of Ancient of Days in Daniel as only God

The real question should be how does one justify their interpretation of Ancient of Days in Daniel as only God. LDS are not dependent upon biblical interpretation for a complete understanding of the meaning of this or any other term. Since LDS have a more expanded idea of Adam's role, it is not surprising that they interpret some verses differently.

The Encyclopedia of Mormonism notes:

For Latter-day Saints, Adam stands as one of the noblest and greatest of all men. Information found in the scriptures and in declarations of latter-day apostles and prophets reveals details about Adam and his important roles in the pre-earth life, in Eden, in mortality, and in his postmortal life. They identify Adam by such names and titles as Michael (D&C 27꞉11; D&C 29꞉26), archangel (D&C 88꞉112), and Ancient of Days (D&C 138꞉38).

Joseph Smith is one source for this view of Adam:

"‘Ancient of Days’ appears to be his title because he is ‘the first and oldest of all.'

This section of Daniel is written in Aramaic, while the rest of the Old Testament is in Hebrew. The phrase translated "Ancient of Days" (attiq yômîn) as one non-LDS source notes, "in reference to God...is unprecedented in the Hebrew texts." Thus, reading this phrase as referring to God (and, in the critics' reading, only God) relies on parallels from Canaanite myth and Baal imagery in, for example, the Ugaritic texts. Latter-day Saints are pleased to have a more expanded view through the addition of revelatory insights.

D&C 27:11 and D&C 116 associate Adam with the ancient of days spoken of in Daniel, but this needs elaboration

Like many Christians, the LDS see many parallels between Christ (who is God in the Old Testament) and Adam. Christ is even called, on occasion, the "second Adam." It is thus not surprising that D&C 27꞉11 associates Adam with a divine title or status when resurrected and exalted—after all, LDS theology anticipates human deification, so God and Adam are not seen as totally "other" or "different" from each other. LDS would have no problem, then, in seeing Adam granted a type of divine title or epithet—they do not see this as necessarily an either/or situation.

This does not mean, however, that Adam and God are the same being, merely that they can ultimately share the same divine nature. Such a reading would be strange to creedal Christians who see God as completely different from His creation. Once again, the theological preconceptions with which we approach the Biblical text affects how we read it.

As one non-LDS scholar noted of the passage in Daniel:

In the Septuagint version of Daniel 7:13 the translator has interpreted ‘he came to the Ancient of Days’ as ‘he came as the Ancient of Days’. Thus, according to this Septuagint interpretation, the Son of Man is in fact the embodiment of the person of the Ancient of Days. In other words the original scene in Daniel 7, where two figures exist alongside each other in heaven, is changed so that the vice-regent, the Son of Man, takes upon himself the form and character of God himself.

It is thus not surprising that Joseph Smith could see Adam taking upon himself "the form and character of God himself" using a similar type of imagery. This type of expansion on scriptures is done literally hundreds of times by biblical prophets.

This is the best view to take in light of our understanding of Jesus Christ as Jehovah of the Old Testament (D&C 110:1-4).

{{Critical sources box:Mormonism and doctrine/Repudiated concepts/Adam-God theory/Ancient of Days/CriticalSources]]

What attempts have been made to reconcile the Adam-God Theory with the doctrines of the Church?

There have been a number of attempts to explain Brigham Young's comments and/or harmonize them with mainstream LDS thought

There have been a number of attempts to explain Brigham Young's comments and/or harmonize them with mainstream LDS thought. Following are some of the better-known approaches.

Approach #1: Adam as the patriarch of the human family

The most well-known is the approach taken by Charles W. Penrose (and followed by John A. Widtsoe and Joseph Fielding Smith) that Brigham was speaking of Adam in the context of him being the presiding priesthood holder over all the human family, and therefore "our Father and our God", similar to how Moses was called a god to Aaron and Pharaoh (Exodus 4:16; 7:1). Joseph Fielding Smith wrote:

President Brigham Young was thoroughly acquainted with the doctrine of the Church. He studied the Doctrine and Covenants and many times quoted from it the particular passages concerning the relationship of Adam to Jesus Christ. He knew perfectly that Adam was subordinate and obedient to Jesus Christ. He knew perfectly that Adam had been placed at the head of the human family by commandment of the Father, and this doctrine he taught during the many years of his ministry. When he said Adam was the only god with whom we have to do, he evidently had in mind this passage given by revelation through Joseph Smith: [quotes D&C 78:15–16].

It is difficult to reconcile President Smith's explanation with the multitude of Brigham's Adam-God sermons and private comments, and how the Saints in Brigham's day understood them. This explanation is perhaps the most widely-known, but it suffers because it ignores many of Brigham's statements on Adam-God where he was quite clear in his intent.

Approach #2: Scribal error

A related approach is that scribal limitations and transmission errors resulted in unclear transcripts that do not convey Brigham Young's original meaning. Most feel, however, that this possibility cannot fully account for all the statements he made on this subject.

Approach #3: "Adam Sr." and "Adam Jr."

LDS researcher Elden Watson, editor of the multi-volume Brigham Young Addresses, believes that Brigham used the term "Adam" as a name-title for both God the Father ("Adam Sr.") and the man Adam ("Adam Jr."), comparable to the way "Elias" is used as a title meaning "forerunner" and applied to various people. According to Watson, the reason modern readers miss this is our failure to take into account all of Brigham's sermons in context. Watson has the advantage of being more familiar with Brigham Young's sermons than perhaps any other living researcher, and he does clearly grasp that Brigham did not equate Elohim/Jehovah/Michael with God the Father/Jesus Christ/Adam as modern Latter-day Saints do. However, Watson's theory has not been widely accepted for several reasons: (a) it is not widely known, (b) it assumes that those in Brigham Young's audience understood that he was talking about two Adams, and (c) Brigham never directly explained his Adam-God teachings in the way Watson interprets them.

Another approach similar to Watson's would be to suggest that perhaps Brigham Young was speaking of at least two Adams, but that he was intentionally veiling what he was talking about, and left it up to individuals to get revelation on the true interpretation. This would be similar to the Lord's use of parables. Some basis for this assertion may rest in the fact that Brigham Young stated that Moses was using "dark sayings" with regard to his story of the rib in Eve's creation, and the fact that President Young dismissed those stories of Adam's and Eve's creations as childish fairy tales. He himself may have practiced the same types of "dark sayings" following a tradition that he believed was started by Moses, by veiling what he was talking about in confusing language. Since he himself was an American Moses, so to speak, he may have felt that he could engage in the same type of practice, and was cluing people in on it by bringing up Moses' use of such things.

Another author suggests a similar theory, that Adam is the generic name that can be used to refer to each male of the species. And that the name Adam symbolically refers to a continuum of progress in degrees along man's journey from pre-existence all the way to Godhood. But this rejects the multiple mortality theories in some interpretations of Adam-God, where Adam falls from an exaltation into another mortality. Each male person that is eventually exalted is both an "Adam Jr." and an "Adam Sr." along different parts of his path of progression. Once he is exalted, he takes on the status of an "Adam Sr." Therefore, Michael becomes a symbol of all men along the path to exaltation, and Elohim becomes a symbol of all men who have reached exaltation. So, in this view, while Adam-God to some degree is about Michael the Archangel and his Father, it is also about each man's journey and eternal progression.

Approach #4: Brigham was wrong

Another approach, championed by LDS researcher Van Hale, is that Brigham Young believed and taught Adam-God, but that he was mistaken. Prophets are human beings and like anyone may misunderstand complex doctrinal subjects, especially ones on which there has been little or no revelation. Elder Bruce R. McConkie also took this position in a letter he wrote in 1981:

Yes, President Young did teach that Adam was the father of our spirits, and all the related things that the [polygamous] cultists ascribe to him. This, however, is not true. He expressed views that are out of harmony with the gospel. But, be it known, Brigham Young also taught accurately and correctly, the status and position of Adam in the eternal scheme of things. What I am saying is that Brigham Young, contradicted Brigham Young, and the issue becomes one of which Brigham Young we will believe. The answer is we will believe the expressions that accord with the teachings in the Standard Works.

Approach #5: We don't know the reason

A final explanation is that Brigham Young believed and taught Adam-God, and what he taught was possibly true, but he didn't see fit to explain all he knew or didn't live long enough to develop the teaching into something that could be reconciled with LDS scripture and presented as official doctrine. In this view, we simply don't know what Brigham Young meant, and modern leaders have warned us about accepting traditional explanations of Adam-God, so we should just leave that belief "on the shelf" until the Lord sees fit to reveal more about it. BYU professor Stephen E. Robinson wrote:

Yet another way in which anti-Mormon critics often misrepresent LDS doctrine is in the presentation of anomalies as though they were the doctrine of the Church. Anomalies occur in every field of human endeavor, even in science. An anomaly is something unexpected that cannot be explained by the existing laws or theories, but which does not constitute evidence for changing the laws and theories. An anomaly is a glitch.... A classic example of an anomaly in the LDS tradition is the so-called "Adam-God theory." During the latter half of the nineteenth century Brigham Young made some remarks about the relationship between Adam and God that the Latter-day Saints have never been able to understand. The reported statements conflict with LDS teachings before and after Brigham Young, as well as with statements of President Young himself during the same period of time. So how do Latter-day Saints deal with the phenomenon? We don't; we simply set it aside. It is an anomaly. On occasion my colleagues and I at Brigham Young University have tried to figure out what Brigham Young might have actually said and what it might have meant, but the attempts have always failed. The reported statements simply do not compute—we cannot make sense out of them. This is not a matter of believing it or disbelieving it; we simply don't know what "it" is. If Brigham Young were here we could ask him what he actually said and what he meant by it, but he is not here.... For the Latter-day Saints, however, the point is moot, since whatever Brigham Young said, true or false, was never presented to the Church for a sustaining vote. It was not then and is not now a doctrine of the Church, and...the Church has merely set the phenomenon aside as an anomaly.

Was the "Adam-God" theory ever taught as part of the temple endowment ceremony as something called "the lecture at the veil"?

Brigham Young attempted to introduce the concept of Adam-God into the endowment, as far as it had been revealed to him and he was able to interpret it

The endowment was and is a ceremony that can be adapted to the needs of its audience. Brigham Young attempted to introduce the concept of Adam-God into the endowment, as far as it had been revealed to him and he was able to interpret it. He was not able to fully resolve the teaching and integrate it into LDS doctrine. After his death, Adam-God was not continued by his successors in the Presidency, and the idea was dropped from the endowment ceremony and from LDS doctrine. If there is anything true in that doctrine, one would expect that truth to be in harmony with what is already revealed. Only further revelation from the Lord's anointed can clear up the matter.

The full meaning of Brigham Young's teachings on Adam-God is not well understood, and the endowment ceremony was not written down until the late nineteenth century

Two points need to be made prior to any discussion of this subject:

1. The full meaning of Brigham Young's teachings on Adam-God is not well understood. What he taught appears to have been a failed attempt to establish a new doctrinal belief. He did not live to reconcile it with LDS scripture, and later prophets did not continue his teaching. (See the main article on Adam-God.)
2. The endowment ceremony was not written down until the late nineteenth century. Before and since that time, it was and has been modified occasionally by Church leaders to clarify and refine the presentation. (See the main article on temple endowment changes.)

How the endowment came to be written, and how Adam-God become part of it

The following is probably the best description of how the temple endowment came to be written, and what part Adam-God played in it:

Shortly after the dedication of the lower portion of the temple, Young decided it was necessary to commit the endowment ceremony to written form. On 14 January 1877 he "requested Brigham jr & W Woodruff to write out the Ceremony of the Endowments from Beginning to End," assisted by John D. T. McAllister and L. John Nuttall. Daily drafts were submitted for Young's review and approval. The project took approximately two months to complete. On 21 March 1877 Woodruff recorded in his journal: "President Young has been laboring all winter to get up a perfect form of Endowments as far as possible. They having been perfected I read them to the Company today."

The St. George endowment included a revised thirty-minute "lecture at the veil" first delivered by Young. This summarized important theological concepts taught in the endowment and contained references to Young's Adam-God doctrine. In 1892 L. John Nuttall, one of those who transcribed Young's lecture, recalled how it came about:

In January 1877, shortly after the lower portion of the St. George Temple was dedicated, President Young, in following up in the Endowments, became convinced that it was necessary to have the formula of the Endowments written, and he gave directions to have the same put in writing.

Shortly afterwards he explained what the Lecture at the Veil should portray, and for this purpose appointed a day when he would personally deliver the Lecture at the Veil. Elders J. D. T. McAllister and L. John Nuttall prepared writing materials, and as the President spoke they took down his words. Elder Nuttall put the same into form and the writing was submitted to President Young on the same evening at his office in residence at St. George. He there made such changes as he deemed proper, and when he finally passed upon it [he] said: This is the Lecture at the Veil to be observed in the Temple.

A copy of the Lecture is kept at the St. George Temple, in which President Young refers to Adam in his creation and etc.

On 1 February 1877, when Young's lecture was first given, Woodruff wrote in his journal: "W Woodruff Presided and Officiated as El[ohim]. I dressed in pure white Doe skin from head to foot to officiate in the Priest Office, white pants vest & C[oat?] the first Example in any Temple of the Lord in this last dispensation. Sister Lucy B Young also dressed in white in officiating as Eve. Pr[e]sident [Young] was present and deliverd a lecture at the veil some 30 Minuts." The copy of the veil lecture which Nuttall describes is not presently available. But on 7 February Nuttall summarized in his diary additions to the lecture which Young made at his residence in Nuttall's presence:

In the creation the Gods entered into an agreement about forming this earth, and putting Michael or Adam upon it. These things of which I have been speaking are what are termed the mysteries of godliness but they will enable you to understand the expression of Jesus, made while in jerusalem, "This is life eternal that they might know thee, the ony true God and jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." We were once acquainted with the Gods and lived with them, but we had the privilege of taking upon us flesh that the spirit might have a house to dwell in. We did so and forgot all, and came into the world not recollecting anything of which we had previously learned. We have heard a great deal about Adam and Eve, how they were formed and etc. Some think he was made like an adobe and the Lord breathed into him the breath of life, for we read "from dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return." Well he was made of the dust of the earth but not of this earth. He was made just the same way you and I are made but on another earth. Adam was an immortal being when he came on this earth; He had lived on an earth similar to ours; he had received the Priesthood and the keys thereof, and had been faithful in all things and gained his resurrection and his exaltation, and was crowned with glory, immortality and eternal lives, and was numbered with the Gods for such he became through his faithfulness, and had begotten all the spirit that was to come to this earth. And Eve our common mother who is the mother of all living bore those spirits in the celestial world. And when this earth was organized by Elohim, Jehovah and Michael, who is Adam our common father, Adam and Eve had the privilege to continue the work of progression, consequently came to this earth and commenced the great work of forming tabernacles for those spirits to dwell in, and when Adam and those that assisted him had completed this kingdom our earth[,] he came to it, and slept and forgot all and became like an infant child. It is said by Moses the historian that the Lord caused a deep sleep to come upon Adam and took from his side a rib and formed the woman that Adam called Eve—This should be interpreted that the Man Adam like all other men had the seed within him to propagate his species, but not the Woman; she conceives the seed but she does not produce it; consequently she was taken from the side or bowels of her father. This explains the mystery of Moses' dark sayings in regard to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve when they were placed on this earth were immortal beings with flesh, bones and sinews. But upon partaking of the fruits of the earth while in the garden and cultivating the ground their bodies became changed from immortal to mortal beings with the blood coursing through their veins as the action of life—Adam was not under transgression until after he partook of the forbidden fruit; this was necessary that they might be together, that man might be. The woman was found in transgression not the man—Now in the law of Sacrifice we have the promise of a Savior and Man had the privilege and showed forth his obedience by offering of the first fruits of the earth and the firstlings of the flocks; this as a showing that Jesus would come and shed his blood.... Father Adam's oldest son (Jesus the Saviour) who is the heir of the family, is father Adam's first begotten in the spirit world, who according to the flesh is the only begotten as it is written. (In his divinity he having gone back into the spirit world, and came in the spirit to Mary and she conceived, for when Adam and Eve got through with their work in this earth, they did not lay their bodies down in the dust, but returned to the spirit world from whence they came.)

Brigham Young died August 29, 1877, shortly after introducing this version of the veil lecture. The evidence is indeterminate as to whether the St. George lecture with its Adam-God teaching was included in all temples or that it continued to the turn of the twentieth century. Buerger writes:

It is not clear, in fact, what did become of the lecture. The apparent ignorance of the subject matter implied by Abraham Cannon's [1888] account—despite his having been a General Authority for six years—suggest it was not routinely presented in the temple. Similar ignorance among some missionaries [in 1897] and their president ... who also presumably had been through the temple prior to their missions supports this conclusion. Although exposes of the temple ceremonies published about this time do not include any reference to this lecture, "fundamentalist" authors have asserted without serious attempt at documentation that Brigham's lecture was an integral part of the temple ceremony until about 1902-1905. In support of this has been placed the testimony of one individual who in 1959 distinctly remembered hearing during his endowment in the temple in 1902 that "Adam was our God." On returning from his mission in 1904 he noted that these teachings had been removed. While one would expect more extensive evidence than this were it true that the lecture was regularly given for twenty-five years, it ... should also be recalled that other "discredited" notions were still being promulgated in some temples by a few individuals during the early years of the twentieth century—such as the continued legitimacy of plural marriage, also a cherished fundamentalist tradition.

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Learn more about Adam-God teachings

Key sources	Matthew Brown, "Brigham Young’s Teachings On Adam," Proceedings of the 2009 FAIR Conference (August 2009). link
FAIR links	Matthew Roper, "Adam in Ancient Texts and the Restoration," Proceedings of the 2006 FAIR Conference (August 2006). link
Online	Arthur A. Bailey, "What Modern Revelation Teaches about Adam," Ensign (January 1998), 20.off-site David John Buerger, "The Adam-God Doctrine," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15 no. 1 (Spring 1982), 14–58. off-site Robert L. Millet, "The Man Adam," Ensign (January 1994), 8.off-site Mark E. Petersen, "Adam, the Archangel," Ensign (November 1980), 16.off-site "Adam-God theory," BH Roberts Foundation print-link.
Video
Print	Mark E. Petersen, Adam: Who Is He? (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1976). ISBN 087747592X. GL direct link
Navigators	Table of contents Abuse Bible Book of Abraham Book of Mormon CES Letter Church history Church finances Doctrine and Covenants First Vision Joseph Smith Latter-day Saint temples Mountain Meadows Massacre Plural marriage Prophets and leaders Scripture Brigham Young

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Source(s) of the criticism

Critical sources

Walter Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults (Revised) (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1997), 220-221. ( Index of claims ) Contender Ministries, Questions All Mormons Should Ask Themselves. Answers Tower to Truth Ministries, "50 Questions to Ask Mormons," towertotruth.net (accessed 15 November 2007). 50 Answers Watchman Fellowship, The Watchman Expositor (Page 3)

Notes

FAIR Answers—back to home page

Brigham Young was the second president of the Church, and the successor to Joseph Smith. He supervised the Saints' exodus from Illinois, and their escape from the United States.

He led the settlement into the Salt Lake valley area of what is now Utah. As territorial governor for a time, and leader of the predominant faith during a period of relative isolation, few Church leaders have impacted its members as thoroughly in so many domains of life.

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Articles about Brigham Young

Teachings	Creation President of US? Adam-God theory Moon inhabited by Quakers? Words as scripture Science and education Word of Wisdom Need to know for ourselves Total submission to him?
History	1844 Succession to Joseph Smith Disagreements with Emma Smith Divine manifestations Freemasonry Lucy Mack Smith's Biography of Joseph Smith *Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre The 'Mormon Reformation'
Race	Brigham Young's statements regarding race
Critics	Fabricated quotes from Brigham Young Quote mining JoD 13:95 Not witness of Christ? Reviews of books about Brigham Young

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Learn more about Brigham Young

FAIR links	Michael Parker, "The Church's Portrayal of Brigham Young" FAIR link
Online	Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, "'There's the Boy I Can Trust': Dennison Lott Harris' First-Person Account of the Conspiracy of Nauvoo and Events Surrounding Joseph Smith's 'Last Charge' to the Twelve Apostles," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 21/2 (15 July 2016). [23–118] link Craig L. Foster, "New Light and Old Shadows: John G. Turner's Attempt to Understand Brigham Young," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 3/8 (8 February 2013). [197–222] link Gregory L. Smith, "Passing Up The Heavenly Gift (Part One of Two)," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 7/6 (18 October 2013). [181–244] link Gregory L. Smith, "Passing Up The Heavenly Gift (Part Two of Two)," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 7/7 (25 October 2013). [245–322] link
Video	"Native American extermination order," BH Roberts Foundation print-link.
Navigators	Table of contents Abuse Bible Book of Abraham Book of Mormon CES Letter Church history Church finances Doctrine and Covenants First Vision Joseph Smith Latter-day Saint temples Mountain Meadows Massacre Plural marriage Prophets and leaders Scripture Brigham Young

1. REDIRECTEvents after the First Vision

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Articles about Brigham Young

Teachings	Creation President of US? Adam-God theory Moon inhabited by Quakers? Words as scripture Science and education Word of Wisdom Need to know for ourselves Total submission to him?
History	1844 Succession to Joseph Smith Disagreements with Emma Smith Divine manifestations Freemasonry Lucy Mack Smith's Biography of Joseph Smith *Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre The 'Mormon Reformation'
Race	Brigham Young's statements regarding race
Critics	Fabricated quotes from Brigham Young Quote mining JoD 13:95 Not witness of Christ? Reviews of books about Brigham Young

Was Brigham Young a Mason?

Yes. Brigham Young, along with many other men in Nauvoo, joined the Masons at Joseph Smith's encouragement

Photo of Brigham Young. The Masonic symbol of compass and square is clearly visible in the pin he wears. Matthew B. Brown notes that "Brigham may have worn the [Masonic] pin [visible in some photographs] in order to remind other Americans that he was part of a brotherhood that was bound by oath to look after its own (see Wilford Woodruff Journal, 19 August 1860)."

Yes. Brigham Young, along with many other men in Nauvoo, joined the Masons at Joseph Smith's encouragement.

When the Latter-day Saints occupied Nauvoo, Illinois, in the year 1842, there were approximately four thousand residents inside the city limits (twelve thousand by 1844),1 but only thirty people in the general area had membership in the Masonic fraternity. Among this small group were such notable men as Hyrum Smith (the Prophet’s brother), Heber C. Kimball (an Apostle), John Smith (the Prophet’s uncle), Newel K. Whitney (a bishop), and George Miller (another bishop)....

There is no evidence that Joseph Smith played a direct role in trying to get a Masonic lodge established among the Saints, though it must be admitted that the Masons adhered to principles that would have been especially attractive to the leader of a frequently (and recently) persecuted people. "Freemasonry is one of the strongest binding contracts that exists between man and man," said Elder John Taylor of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.10 And according to Apostle and Master Mason Heber C. Kimball, a member of that society could expect other Masons to step forward in time of need to render assistance. These fraternal brothers were expected to be faithful to each other "in every case and under every circumstance, the commission of crime excepted."....

[On] 7 April 1842 [Joseph attended the] initiation of Brigham Young.

[On] 9 April 1842 [Joseph attended the further] initiation of Samuel Smith, William Smith, Brigham Young, and Willard Richards.

Was Brigham Young a "33rd degree" Mason?

No. Brigham Young was a Mason, but was not a 33rd degree Mason

No. Brigham Young was a Mason, but was not a 33rd degree Mason (technically an auxiliary degree of the Scottish Rite). It would have been impossible for Brigham Young to become such, since that degree was first introduced in Illinois masonic lodges (the only lodges to which Brigham had access prior to the exodus to Utah) in 1857, long after Brigham's departure. (The 33 degree did not become formalized in the Untied States until the early 1850's with the work of Albert Pike and Dr. Albert G. Mackey.)

It is important to understand the nature of the appellate bodies in Masonry. While a 33 degree mason might sound impressive, in fact such a person hold no more authority in Masonry than does the typical Master Mason (3rd degree). The appellate bodies are under the control of the Grand Lodge of a state or territory and a Grand Lodge is made up of all the Master Mason in that state or territory. The highest office any Mason can hold is that of Grand Master of a Grand Lodge and the only requirement to be elected to that office is to be a Master Mason. Therefor the highest degree that any Mason can hold is that of Master Mason (3rd Degree). The appellate degrees are appendages to that degree and not "higher" degrees as they are sometimes presented.

Masonry in Utah

Utah territory had no lodge until 1872. Such a lodge would have been a prerequisite for any Scottish Rite appellate body to be formed.

While there were at least two abortive attempts to form a Grand Lodge in the territory by the Mormons, one by means of an application to the United Grand Lodge of England which seems to have been lost and never reached that body and another made to a Grand Lodge in Mexico which was rejected. Masonry by and large was not practiced by the Mormon population in Utah in Brigham Young's day. Indeed, the Grand Lodge of Utah was not formed until 1874 and it then imposed a ban on Mormons being members. This even precluded Mormon Masons from other jurisdictions from visiting Utah lodges. This would continue in some form until 1984.

Thus, it would have not have been possible for Brigham Young to have received the 33 degree designation while in Utah. Given that the 33 degree is an honorary designation (that is, it is given by the vote of others holding the degree) it would seem unlikely in the extreme that such an honor would have been given to Brigham who, at the time, was generally held in low regard. Likewise, the Mormons in general were viewed with disdain by the general population of Americans, and the above-mentioned hostility of the Grand Lodge of Utah towards Mormons also makes claiming that Young was honored in this way implausible.

Perhaps most telling of all is there is no documentary evidence of Brigham Young ever receiving such a degree either from the Northern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite of which the Grand Lodge of Illinois is a member or in the Southern Jurisdiction of which the Grand Lodge of Utah is governed. While in the early years of those rites some record keeping was lost or not well kept by the mid-19th century when Brigham Young would have been able to receive such a degree the records of both jurisdictions are very complete. Those records are silent in this matter.

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Articles about Brigham Young

Teachings	Creation President of US? Adam-God theory Moon inhabited by Quakers? Words as scripture Science and education Word of Wisdom Need to know for ourselves Total submission to him?
History	1844 Succession to Joseph Smith Disagreements with Emma Smith Divine manifestations Freemasonry Lucy Mack Smith's Biography of Joseph Smith *Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre The 'Mormon Reformation'
Race	Brigham Young's statements regarding race
Critics	Fabricated quotes from Brigham Young Quote mining JoD 13:95 Not witness of Christ? Reviews of books about Brigham Young

Did Brigham Young violate the Word of Wisdom by using snuff, tobacco, and tea?

Brigham indicated that his use of tobacco was medicinal

The Word of Wisdom was not enforced as rigorously, or with the same requirements, in Brigham Young's day. Many speakers emphasized the Lord's patience in this matter, as applied to both leaders and members. The Word of Wisdom was not the strict test of fellowships that it is for the modern member.

But, some of the events with which the critics wish to shock the modern member probably have nothing to do with the Word of Wisdom at all. They are concerned about medical practice, not the social or recreational use of substances. The critics' tactics are akin to pointing out slyly that President Kimball used morphine—while not mentioning the fact that the morphine was prescribed for cancer pain by a physician. The choices made by the nineteenth century saints and leaders should be seen in their historical context, not ours.

Critics count on "presentism"—they hope readers will judge historical figures by the standards of our day, instead of their day.

Some forbidden substances were seen as having a medicinal use

Critics also fail to point out that the fact that some forbidden substances were seen as having a medicinal use, for which the Saints were free to use them. Brigham indicated that this was the case with his tobacco use:

It is our right and privilege to live so that we may attain to this, so that we may sanctify our hearts before the Lord, and sanctify the Lord God in our hearts, but it is not my privilege to drink liquor, neither is it my privilege to eat tobacco. Well, bro. Brigham, have you not done it? Yes, for many years, but I ceased its habitual practice. I used it for toothache; now I am free from that pain, and my mouth is never stained with tobacco. It is not my privilege to drink liquor nor strong tea and coffee although I am naturally a great lover of tea. Brethren and sisters, it is not our privilege to indulge in these things, but it is our right and privilege to set an example worthy of imitation.

Strange as it seems, tobacco was seen as a medication for some conditions in Brigham's time. (To learn more about medical beliefs and the Word of Wisdom substances, see here.)

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Source(s) of the criticism

Critical sources

Jerald and Sandra Tanner, The Changing World of Mormonism (Moody Press, 1979), 474.( Index of claims )

Why did Brigham Young build a whiskey distillery in Utah?

Whiskey was seen as having a medicinal use

Critic charge that this was hypocritical, thus encouraging others to violate the Word of Wisdom.The Word of Wisdom was not enforced as rigorously, or with the same requirements, in Brigham Young's day. Many speakers emphasized the Lord's patience in this matter, as applied to both leaders and members.

But, some of the events with which the critics wish to shock the modern member probably have nothing to do with the Word of Wisdom at all. They are concerned about medical practice or other legitimate uses, not the social or recreational use of substances. The choices made by the nineteenth century saints and leaders should be seen in their historical context, not ours.

Whiskey had legitimate uses—for medication, for the cleaning of wounds, and for the cleaning of the body

Critics also fail to point out that the fact that some forbidden substances were seen as having a medicinal use, for which the Saints were free to use them. Said Brigham:

When there was no whisky to be had here, and we needed it for rational purposes, I built a house to make it in. When the distillery was almost completed and in good working order, an army was heard of in our vicinity and I shut up the works I did not make a gallon of whisky at my works, because it came here in great quantities, more than was needed. I could have made thousands of dollars from my still, which has ever since been as dead property.

Whiskey could have legitimate uses—for medication, for the cleaning of wounds, and for the cleaning of the body. Furthermore, the application of the Word of Wisdom did not necessarily require complete abstinence, as Brigham taught on another occasion:

I have no fellowship for men who are guilty of breaking the Sabbath, of drinking spirituous liquors to excess....

This message was echoed elsewhere:

Brigham Young

"You have read that piece of excellent advice called the "Word of Wisdom." I shall not say you must obey it; you can read it over again and refresh your memories, and I give the privilege to the Elders of Israel to cease using tobacco, and if they will not cease using it, then raise it; and then, also, to cease using spirituous liquors to excess....If you will cease drinking spirituous liquors you will thereby be benefited individually and benefit the community. A man who indulges in any habit that is pernicious to the general good in its example and influence, is not only an enemy to himself but to the community so far as the influence of that habit goes. A man who would not sacrifice a pernicious habit for the good it would do the community is, to say the least of it, lukewarm in his desires and wishes for public and general improvement. Tobacco is not good for man; spirituous liquor is not good for a beverage, but in many cases it is good for washing the body."

Heber C. Kimball

"If any of you have been in the practice of drinking spirituous liquors to excess cease at once the wicked and destructive practice."

Erastus Snow

"If a person having a strong desire for stimulants, such as spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, tobacco, opium, &c., that stimulate the nervous system to excess, and continues to gratify this appetite, will soon destroy the elasticity of his nervous system, and become like a bow that is often bent almost to breaking....We must neither indulge in excessive eating, excessive drinking, nor in excessive working, whereby to overtax our physical energies or our nervous system.

Joseph F. Smith

We do not want these things here; but we are not supreme; we cannot govern as we would wish. Not that we desire to rule with an iron hand, oppressively. It would not be oppression to me, for the Proper authorities to say,—"You Shall not take intoxicating liquors; you shall neither manufacture nor drink them, for they are injurious to your body and mind," nor would it be to any Saint,—but what oppression it would be to a certain class! Yet I hope to see the day when, within the pale of the kingdom of God, no man will be allowed to take intoxicating liquor; and make—I was acing to say, a beast of himself. But I do not name it, rather to make a degraded man of himself. Beasts would not degrade themselves as men do. The habits of the brutes are decent in the eyes of God and angels when compared with the conduct of drunken, debauched men, who pollute mind and body by the commission of every species of vice and crime. I want to see the day when no man in the midst of this people will be allowed to touch intoxicating drink to become drunken.

Do the "Mormons" drink it? Yes, to their shame, disgrace and the violation of their covenants, some of them do; and while on this subject I will say that no one supposes for a moment that a confirmed and unrepentant drunkard will ever be permitted within the gates of the celestial city. We all understand this, but I want to bear my testimony that those who prostitute mind and body by the debasing use of intoxicating drinks and the crimes and evils to which it leads will never have part in the celestial kingdom. "But," says one, "did not some of the ancients get 'boozy' once in a while?" If they did they had to repent of it. I do not excuse them any more than I would you or myself, for taking a course of this kind. Yet God sees as we cannot [p.285] see. He takes all things into consideration, He does not judge partially as we are liable to do. When He places a man in the balance He weights him righteously, but when we judge a man we are apt to judge un-righteously, because we are not omniscient. But what necessity is there for a healthy person to take intoxicating liquor? Does it ever do him any good? No, never. But does it never do any good to use liquor? I do not say that. When it is used for washing the body according to the revelations God has given, and when absolutely necessary if used with wisdom for sickness, it may do good, but when it is used to the extent that it destroys reason and judgment it is never used with impunity. All who thus use it then violate an immutable law, the penalty of which must inevitably follow the transgressor. It is against this practice that I am speaking. If there be any guilty of it here this afternoon, and I have no doubt there are, I wish them to take warning (italics added, underline is emphasis in original).

Franklin D. Richards

I am not asleep to, nor unaware of the fact that many of us coming from the world have brought with us a deep craving for spirituous liquors, and for other things which are not good for us, but which we may have dabbled in to gratify a wicked appetite. Parents afflicted with these propensities ought to take warning not to breed them into the natures of their children, and if possibly they have done so, to use diligence to preserve them from being thrown in the way of temptation until they come to years of understanding, judgment and firmness of purpose, which will enable them to practice self-denial, and live as men of God. These are matters that need to be looked after.

Brigham was prepared to produce a limited amount for such uses—the Saints were isolated in Utah and had to either produce or import everything they needed. He was not pleased, however, at the influx of whiskey and attendant over-use which accompanied the U.S. army.

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Source(s) of the criticism

Critical sources

Jerald and Sandra Tanner, The Changing World of Mormonism (Moody Press, 1979), 474.( Index of claims )

Why did Brigham Young instruct members of the Church to grow tobacco in Utah?

Since Brigham realized that a considerable sum was being spent annually on tobacco he preferred that these funds remain within the territory to foster further economic growth and self-sufficiency

Since Brigham realized that a considerable sum ($60-80,000 in 1861 dollars) was being spent annually on tobacco (at least a small part of which was used for medicinal purposes in the 19th century) he preferred that these funds remain within the territory to foster further economic growth and self-sufficiency, rather than disappearing into eastern markets.

The Word of Wisdom was enforced differently in the 19th century than today

The Word of Wisdom was enforced differently in the 19th century than today. It was not the strict test of fellowships that it is for the modern member.

Leonard Arrington (later Church Historian) described how difficulties with the U.S. federal government, and the Saints' relative isolation, led them to adopt a program of economic self-sufficiency. Simply put, Brigham and other leaders wanted to conserve the Saints' cash, and preferred to make or grow anything which they consumed locally:

The self-sufficiency program which followed the Utah War and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 led Mormon leaders to greatly expand the southern colonies

The self-sufficiency program which followed the Utah War and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 led Mormon leaders to greatly expand the southern colonies. In October 1861, 309 families were called to go south immediately to settle in what would now be called "Utah's Dixie". They represented a variety of occupations and were instructed to go in an organized group and "cheerfully contribute their efforts to supply the Territory with cotton, sugar, grapes, tobacco, figs, almonds, olive oil and such other useful articles as the Lord has given us, the places for garden spots in the south to produce." Brigham Young specifically desired them to produce the territorial supply of tobacco—so as to eliminate "paying to outsiders from sixty to eighty thousand dollars annually for that one article—and also wine: for the Holy Sacrament, for medicine, and for sale to "outsiders."

The Word of Wisdom was not enforced as rigorously, or with the same requirements, in Brigham Young's day. Many speakers emphasized the Lord's patience in this matter, as applied to both leaders and members.

Response to Passing the Heavenly Gift: Claims about Brigham Young and apostles not being witnesses of Christ

Jump to details:

• Apostles as personal witnesses of Christ
• Question: Did any nineteenth century leader after Joseph Smith report divine visions?
• Question: Did any twentieth century leader after Joseph Smith report divine visions?

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Articles about the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Overview

Overview Historical summary of the Mountain Meadows Massacre Perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre Others involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Did Brigham Young block prosecution of the individuals responsible for the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

Brigham Young's presidential office journal (and other items) makes it clear that federal prosecutors are the most responsible for not bringing the perpetrators to justice

Critics charge that Brigham Young blocked prosecution of those who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

LaJean Purcell Carruth deciphered Brigham Young's presidential office journal (and other items) written in Deseret Alphabet. This newly discovered information makes it clear that federal prosecutors —not Brigham Young!—-are the most responsible for not bringing the perpetrators to justice. Thomas Alexander writes:

On July 5, 1859, after the public knew that Cumming had received word from Washington placing the army under the governor’s control, Young met with George A. Smith, Albert Carrington, and James Ferguson. They discussed the "reaction to the Mountain Meadow Massacre." Young told them that US. attorney Alexander Wilson had called "to consult with him about making some arrests of" the accused.[95]

On the same day, Wilson had met with Young. Young told him "that if the judges would open a court at Parowan or some other convenient location in the south, .. . unprejudiced and uninfluenced by. . . the army, so that man could have a fair and impartial trial He would go there himself, and he presumed that Gov. Cumming would also go . . . " He "would use all his influence to have the parties arrested and have the whole. . . matter investigated thoroughly and impartially and justice meted out to every man." Young said he would not exert himself, however, "to arrest men to be treated like dogs and dragged about by the army, and confined and abused by them,’ presumably referring to the actions of Cradlebaugh and the army in Provo. Young said that if the judges and army treated people that way, the federal officials "must hunt them up themselves."[96]

Wilson agreed that it was unfair "to drag men and their witnesses 200 or 300 miles to trial." Young said "the people wanted a fair and impartial court of justice, like they have in other states and territories, and if he had anything to do with it, the army must keep its place." Wilson said he felt "the proposition was reasonable and he would propose it to the judges."[97]

Now confident that the army would not intrude and abuse or murder Mormons, and that the US. attorney and governor would support them, the church leaders lent their influence to bringing the accused into court. On June 15, 1859, to prepare the way for the administration of justice, Brigham Young had told George A. Smith and Jacob Hamblin that "as soon as a Court of Justice could be held, so that men could be heard without the influence of the military he should advise men accused to come forward and demand trial on the charges preferred against them for the Mountain Meadow Massacre" as he had previously done. Then he again sent George A. Smith and Amasa Lyman south, this time to urge those accused of the crime to prepare for trial and to try to suppress Mormon-authored crime[98].

However, Utah's governor felt that any such crimes would be covered by the post-Utah war amnesty.

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Source(s) of the criticism

Critical sources

Richard Abanes, One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 243–252 ( Index of claims ) Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 217–235. David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847–1896 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998), ??. (bias and errors) Review Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, (Secker & Warburg, 2003), 209. Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (Anchor, 2004), ??.

Was prosecution of those responsible for Mountain Meadows Massacre blocked by the Church?

There is no evidence the Church blocked prosecution of the Massacre perpetrators

It is claimed that actions of Brigham Young and the institutional Church and/or local Mormons prevented federal officials from prosecuting those guilty of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

There is no evidence the Church blocked prosecution of the Massacre perpetrators. There is substantial evidence that poor federal organization, infighting, and refusal to deputize LDS lawmen played a role in slowing the process. When presented with evidence by lawful authorities, LDS juries returned indictments.

• The post-Utah war amnesty led some non-members to believe that the massacre was covered under the presidential amnesty.
• There was a long-running dispute over jurisdiction and tactics between the judiciary and the executive (i.e., federal prosecutor) branches. This had nothing to do with the Mormons, but hampered prosecution.
• Disputes between the above groups also led to difficulties with the army, something also not under Mormon control or influence.
• Judges' meddling in the arrest process made it virtually impossible to properly arrest and indict perpetrators.
• The grand jury in southern Utah was never asked to indict anyone for the Massacre during their first session. When presented with the opportunity, they returned indictments later that same year.
• The Mormons did not, as claimed, insist on the right to dictate who sat on petit juries. Other federal officials declared this to be completely false.
• Federal officials and judges refused to deputize or use LDS lawmen to make arrests.
• The U.S. attorney general refused the district attorney's request to reopen the investigation in 1872—once again, this was beyond the Mormons' control or influence.
• Brigham Young had been relieved of his position as territorial governor. He had no secular authority to directly arrest or charge perpetrators.

One reviewer described the difficulties with this theory:

The Amnesty

Blood of the Prophets has charged high-ranking church officials with two decades of obstructing the federal investigation. Bagley's emphasis is in Mormon history, so he sometimes shows his lack of breadth in political and social matters that originate outside the Great Basin. One of the areas in which he displays this weakness is his failure to discuss the effect of President Buchanan's general amnesty upon the massacre prosecutions (p. 205).

[U.S. President] Buchanan issued an amnesty for all crimes of the Mormons related to the claimed acts of sedition and treason [during the U.S. army's assignment to Utah in the abortive "Utah War"]. Governor Alfred Cumming announced a broad interpretation of that amnesty to the Saints on 14 June 1858. Certainly, by the date of the amnesty, federal officials believed that Mormons had directed the massacre, and they believed that John D. Lee was one of the leaders. One might reasonably conclude that the amnesty was intended to cover the massacre participants.

Some in the federal government and the press believed that Buchanan intended to pardon the massacre perpetrators. Indian superintendent Jacob Forney was so upset with U.S. District Court Judge John Cradlebaugh's massacre investigation that he cursed Cradlebaugh's name, citing the amnesty as the basis for his objections, or so we are told from a source hostile to Forney. Non-Mormon U.S. District Attorney Alexander Wilson and non-Mormon U.S. District Court Judge Charles C. Sinclair disagreed over the application of the amnesty, with Wilson refusing to present to the jury bills of indictment. Harper's Weekly noted the conflict over the amnesty in the prosecution of the massacre. The New York Post opined that the amnesty excused the massacre crimes because it was an aspect of the Utah war intended to come within the amnesty's scope. It is no wonder that prosecution was uncertain. But, given the controversy the amnesty sparked in the Eastern press with regard to the massacre investigation, it seems that Blood of the Prophets would have discussed it. This is a significant omission.

Disputes between the executive and judicial branches

The presidential amnesty contributed to the lengthy delay in federal prosecution. In addition, the federal judiciary and federal prosecutor fought over control of the massacre investigation. This internecine dispute stymied federal investigation of the massacre for several years. Bagley does not discuss this feud as a source for delay.

At the national level in the early nineteenth century, the federal judiciary and the prosecutors repeatedly jockeyed for power in ways that would appear unseemly today. Thomas Jefferson said that the "great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot & unalarming advance, [is] gaining ground step by step. . . . Let the eye of vigilance never be closed." He condemned the judiciary's usurpation of the legislative prerogatives with its pious interpretation of its own brand of Christianity.55 The U.S. Constitution gives little direction to the judiciary compared to what it gives to the legislative and executive branches. The Hamiltonian Federalists saw the federal judiciary as a way to expand federal power and to crush state self-determinism (read: slavery). The Jeffersonian republicans believed states' rights were paramount except as to powers specifically delegated to the federal government. The Federalist judiciary gained the upper hand with the enforcement of the Sedition Act of 4 July 1798, which crushed Jeffersonian dissent. As historian James Simon explains, their "blatantly partisan actions [of stifling criticism of the John Adams administration] in pursuit of convictions under the Sedition Act reinforced Jefferson's profound distrust of the federal judiciary." Supreme Court Justice Salmon Chase's prosecutions under the Sedition Act, while a sitting Supreme Court justice, were notorious, eventually leading to an attempt to remove him by impeachment.

Utah's federal judges replayed this high national drama on a frontier stage. As with the amnesty, Blood of the Prophets fails to see the broad political and social issues of the struggle for federal power. Brigham Young's demand for local self-determinism replaced Thomas Jefferson's urbane urge for state self-determinism. Polygamy, rather than slavery, was an affront to federal power and needed to be crushed. In the early days of Utah, federal judges of questionable character—a point Van Vliet conceded—directed the investigation of crime, requested army troops to march against the local citizenry, harangued citizens in their places of worship about the lack of virtue in their plural wives, and testified in Congress about Mormon debauchery. These judicial efforts to crush the Mormon theocracy would be unthinkable today in any social context.

Blood of the Prophets accepts Cradlebaugh's account of the dispute uncritically, condemning the U.S. district attorney as "pliant" (p. 235) and "'closely allied to the Mormons by some mysterious tie'" (p. 217) for failing to do anything about the massacre. Citing Cradlebaugh and Sinclair, we are told that Wilson's "whole course of conduct has been marked with culpable timidity and neglect." Bagley would have us believe that the U.S. district attorney was too cozy with the Mormons and that the Mormons lobbied him to ignore the massacre.

The official correspondence, however, shows that the executive and judicial branches of government distrusted each other and that neither was effective in the prosecution of the massacre. The purported investigation began, at least in Cradlebaugh's view, with grand jury proceedings from 8 to 21 March 1859 in Provo. Mormon accounts say Cradlebaugh called out the army to terrorize the local Provo population with the might of federal power. Cradlebaugh and Bagley assert that the troops were necessary to protect the court and witnesses from Mormon Danite assassins. Governor Cumming sided with the Mormons, who were outraged with Cradlebaugh's use of the troops. Cumming believed that he, as the federal executive, had the sole civilian authority to call out the troops in the Territory.

Attorney General Black in Washington, D.C., said that it was not Cradlebaugh's job to determine whom to prosecute or when to call out the troops. He instructed U.S. District Attorney Wilson to "oppose every effort which any judge may make to usurp your functions. . . . If the judges will confine themselves to the simple and plain duty imposed upon them by law of hearing and deciding the cases that are brought before them, I am sure that the business of the Territory will get along very well."

President Buchanan approved of Wilson's efforts to resist the judiciary's incursion into his prerogatives and the use of federal troops. General Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding Camp Floyd, implied that he was unhappy being called into the fray to support the judiciary.

Black attempted to rein in the Utah judges, explaining to them the judiciary's function to "hear patiently the causes brought before them." The executive branch has a "public accuser, and a marshal." As the U.S. Supreme Court said in an 1868 landmark case, public prosecutions are within the exclusive jurisdiction of the U.S. district attorney until indicted offenses are in trial before a petit jury. Judges have no role in prosecutions until then.

Addressing a defensive letter to President Buchanan, Cradlebaugh and fellow judge Charles Sinclair admitted that "the difficulty [which has] arisen between the judiciary and executive is deeply to be deplored." Nonetheless, the judges attacked Governor Cumming and U.S. District Attorney Wilson for failing to faithfully execute their duties, especially in connection with the 1859 Provo grand jury.

Cradlebaugh's grasping for prosecutorial power made prosecution nigh impossible. Prosecutors must work with judges to obtain warrants and convene grand juries, but Cradlebaugh would not cooperate. He complained to Buchanan that Wilson refused to execute (i.e., serve) bench warrants for witnesses, but Wilson countered that Cradlebaugh would not give him the warrants for execution. Wilson wanted the massacre grand jury to be empanelled in southern Utah, close to the scene. He also urged the Justice Department to provide funds "to enable the officers of the court to make a patient and thorough search for evidence." Cradlebaugh (remember, he is the judge, not the prosecutor) responded to Wilson's request by traveling to Santa Clara and issuing arrest warrants in 1859. None of them were executed. Why not? Cradlebaugh failed to include in his entourage the person with prosecutorial discretion, the U.S. district attorney. He further refused to respond to Wilson's request for information about the warrants so that they could be served. Cradlebaugh also refused to tell Wilson about his activities in Santa Clara. Blood of the Prophets does not explain how the prosecutor could be expected to prosecute when the judge shuts him out of the process.

The significance of this episode is unmistakable. The prosecution delayed as it resisted the judiciary's grasping for control of the massacre investigation. This material escapes Bagley.

Mormons would not indict in 1859 grand jury?

According to Bagley, the 8—21 March 1859 grand jury proceedings in Provo provide a lurid but relevant detour in the story of the massacre prosecutions. He uses the story of the grand jury to show that Mormons obstructed prosecutions by refusing to indict their own for the massacre and for other crimes. The book claims that the grand jury "'utterly refused to do anything'" about the massacre and other crimes against non-Mormons. Thus the federal grand jury "ground to a halt" (p. 218). The implication of Bagley's claim is that church authorities instructed grand jurors to obstruct voting when bills for indictment against Mormons were presented to them. Bagley, however, has missed primary source material which contradicts his conclusions.

This tale of the grand jury is central to one of Bagley's more salacious themes. Blood of the Prophets paints a picture of a community of priests dripping in gentile blood, with Mormon laity thumbing their noses as federal authorities sought to staunch the flow. Bagley and Cradlebaugh make much of the all-Mormon Provo grand jury's failure to return any criminal indictments, including in the notorious Parrish and Potter case and the Henry Jones case. Blood of the Prophets does not have the facts right in the Henry Jones case, confusing it with a different and unrelated crime. Bagley tells us that church authorities obstructed not only the massacre investigation, but also the investigation of other notorious crimes for which, he says, there were never any indictments (pp. 75—76).

The official correspondence refutes these claims. Bagley has the facts wrong because he does not rely upon the official files. U.S. District Attorney Wilson's diary (again, it was his duty to bring indictments, not Cradlebaugh's) and his report to the U.S. attorney general indicate that no indictment was obtained from the Provo grand jury for the Mountain Meadows Massacre because none was requested by the U.S. district attorney. Yes, Judge Cradlebaugh may have asked for indictments in his initial charge, but this was an empty request because it was not his lawful request to make. It was U.S. District Attorney Wilson's job alone to control the grand jury's reception of evidence and the timing of decision. Wilson never asked the grand jury to indict for massacre offenses. The grand jury's term was occupied with other crimes, and then Cradlebaugh discharged the grand jury before Wilson could ask the grand jury to act. An army officer, familiar with the proceedings, opined that the reason Cradlebaugh dismissed the grand jury precipitously was not that Cradlebaugh was upset with its performance, but that General Johnston withdrew Cradlebaugh's army escort. In addition, when a second grand jury was empanelled in 1859, no indictments were sought for the massacre. Yet, Bagley would have us believe on the sole basis of Cradlebaugh's claims that the grand juries refused to indict for the massacre.

Just as Bagley has the facts wrong about the 1859 grand jury's treatment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, so does he miss important facts about the grand jury's treatment of other crimes. The second 1859 grand jury handed down indictments for the Parrish and Potter and the Henry Jones cases, yet Bagley tells us that no indictments were ever obtained for these crimes.

Church would not help capture fugitives?

Bagley claims that high Mormon officials refused to cooperate in apprehending the massacre fugitives. For example, Cradlebaugh reports that he told Buchanan that church officials offered to produce fugitives upon condition that the church dictate the composition of the petit juries. Bagley does not tell us that U.S. District Attorney Wilson declared this "an unqualified falsehood." Mormons did no such thing.

The federal judiciary denied Mormon law enforcement officers the power to assist federal officers in the pursuit of criminal convictions. Governor Cumming complained that the federal judges refused to admit to the bar federal territorial prosecutors. Indeed, Cradlebaugh and fellow judges refused to permit the Mormon territorial attorney (even though he was technically an officer of the United States) to enter their courtrooms and present bills for indictments.

U.S. District Attorney Wilson attempted to persuade non-Mormon Deputy U.S. Marshal William Rodgers to effect service of process upon massacre participants. Rodgers rebuffed the request, claiming a lack of resources. Then, on 6 August 1858, Wilson told the federal marshal that the Mormon territorial marshal, John Kay, would accomplish the investigations and the arrests. According to Wilson, "Kay was a Mormon, had a knowledge of the country and of the people, and expressed a determination, if legally deputized, to make arrests if possible." But, Rodgers refused to deputize Kay on the ground that Kay "was a Mormon." For the federal government, a crook on the lam was better than a crook collared by a Mormon.

The federal marshal was also less than diligent, frequently complaining about a lack of pay. However, federal surveyors had no difficulty locating and using the services of the fugitives. The surveyors' accounts mock the progress of the investigation, recounting jokes with and pranks upon the fugitives. Additionally, in 1872, the U.S. attorney general denied a request by the U.S. district attorney to reopen the investigation of the massacre.

As another example of silly officiousness, immediately prior to Lee's first trial in 1875, lawyers Jabez Sutherland and George C. Bates offered to surrender indictees William Stewart, Isaac Haight, George Adair, and John Higbee in return for accommodating their request for bail. U.S. District Judge Jacob Boreman was incensed with this proposal, refused it, and instead commenced disbarment proceedings against these lawyers. Blood of the Prophets touches on this briefly but not fairly (p. 290). Although a defense lawyer may not shield a fugitive, it is common for fugitives to negotiate the terms of their surrender indirectly through lawyers. Judge Boreman's 13 February 1875 letter to Sutherland and Bates shows that the judiciary petulantly refused to deal with Mormons or even attorneys for Mormons. The judge condemned Sutherland for taking on a Mormon as a client because Mormons have "the very soul of corruption." Boreman's refusal to discuss bail is ironic in light of the bail he later granted Lee.

Federal judges denied Mormons permission to assist federal officials with criminal prosecutions. These judges considered Mormons as disloyal "foreigners," as un-American, "perverted, oppressed, [and] alien." Mormons could not be trusted to do anything, including fight crime. Avoiding collaboration with the Mormons was of greater social value than justice.

Bagley fails to report accurately early efforts at apprehension. Skipping over legitimate offers of help, Bagley accuses the church of obstructing justice by frustrating the investigation. That is not appropriate, given the evidence.

Brigham Young took no official action?

Blood of the Prophets criticizes Brigham Young for doing nothing in his official capacity to prosecute the massacre (p. 379). Young, however, explained that he took no official governmental action against the perpetrators because President Buchanan stripped him of these powers and Governor Cumming possessed all the powers of the executive. Once he was stripped of civil power, the church may have well taken the position that the Mormon prophet's control over wrongdoers was limited to the remedies specified in section 134 of the church's Doctrine and Covenants. Nothing required Brigham Young to hunt down the participants and turn them over to the very powers seeking to jail him for bigamy (see D&C 134:4).

There is no competent evidence of a Mormon cabal to influence the executive branch to delay prosecution. There is much speculation, but nothing more. The Eastern press occasionally blamed the delay upon the Buchanan and subsequent administrations. The will to prosecute was not there. Both Cradlebaugh and Wilson gave up and left town before the Civil War. [article cited ends here]

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Source(s) of the criticism

Critical sources

Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 217–235. David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847–1896 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998), 243–252. (bias and errors) Review Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, (Secker & Warburg, 2003), 209. John Dehlin, "Questions and Answers," Mormon Stories Podcast (25 June 2014).

Was there a "deal" made with Brigham Young regarding prosecution for the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

There is no compelling evidence that such a deal was ever made

Critics charge that only a corrupt "deal" with Brigham Young allowed prosecutors to charge and convict anyone with the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

The continued theory of a deal to offer Lee as a scapegoat lacks competent, much less compelling, evidence. Speculation is a game played by Bagley...but there ought to be more than that.

One reviewer described the difficulties with this theory:

Introduction

Blood of the Prophets tells us that the U.S. district attorney's office struck a deal with the church: they would offer John D. Lee as a scapegoat to avoid all further prosecutions, and in return the church would help convict Lee in a second trial. For critics of the church (and I would put Blood of the Prophets in this category), the deal and scapegoat story helps sell the idea that the church was not above thwarting justice. For advocates of John D. Lee (and I would put [Juanita] Brooks in this category), the deal and the scapegoat theory helps sell the idea that an innocent Lee was willing to suffer as a martyr for his friends and church.

The deal is important to Bagley's conclusions. He says: "In a case that threatened to shake the LDS church to its foundations, the prosecutor found he could only secure a guilty verdict with the cooperation of Mormon authorities. As attorneys do, Howard made a deal" (p. 300). As part of this deal, the church assisted Howard with manufactured evidence and manipulated justice (p. 299). Bagley also tells us that U.S. District Attorney Howard was "'on the make,'" or in other words, had been bribed or threatened with blackmail by church leaders (p. 299).

Bagley's failures in this area are the same as Brooks's and the Salt Lake Daily Tribune's. The latter first floated this theory on 27 September 1876, citing only supposition. So Bagley is in good company.

...we will [first] examine the law, which demonstrates that any deal would have been a worthless nullity. We will then look at the evidence Bagley offers to support his theory of a deal, to show that his evidence lacks proper foundation and is thus not reliable. Lastly, we will see from an overwhelming amount of official correspondence that Howard's later actions were inconsistent with any "deal."

The law

The Law Pertaining to Agreements to Thwart Justice. A "deal" to thwart justice would have been a legal impossibility, a nullity, void at the outset, and obligating nobody. Under English and American common law, certain agreements such as agreements to collect gambling debts incurred in nongambling jurisdictions, to pay for a prostitute, or not to report a crime are unenforceable. Another example of an unenforceable agreement is an agreement to forbear prosecution of a crime. In U.S. v. Ford, an 1878 U.S. Supreme Court decision, the court summarized the law of forbearance of prosecution. A grant of immunity must be approved by a judge and is granted only to accomplices willing to come forward and testify in good faith against an accused. On the other hand, the court said that an executive pardon does not require approval by a judge or does not constitute an agreement to come forward to testify, but it does require a presidential act. A pardon usually comes only after conviction of the to-be-pardoned felon. Thus, the two kinds of deals approved by the Supreme Court require an official stamp of approval by persons other than the prosecutor; secret deals would not work.

Before the Supreme Court's 1878 decision, grants of immunity were questionable. Prevailing law before U.S. v. Ford suggested that a grant of immunity might not have been enforceable if the person granted immunity "appear[ed] to have been the principal offender" and that the best one could hope for was an "equitable" claim to a presidential pardon. Howard would also have known that an unlawful grant of immunity may have been a crime itself; he could have been subject to prosecution. He was obviously knowledgeable in the area because he appears to have offered John D. Lee a presidential pardon after Lee's conviction.

Any subsequent U.S. district attorney, or even Howard himself, could have simply ignored a deal to thwart justice and could have prosecuted any person worthy of prosecution. Therefore, if a deal to thwart justice was a nullity at the outset, it seems unlikely that a competent lawyer would have spent any effort reaching such a deal.

Bagley's Evidence of a Deal

Turning to Bagley's evidence of a deal to make John D. Lee a scapegoat (which really is unnecessary to discuss, given the legal impossibility of such a deal in the first place), we find it wanting. For example, there is no evidence whatsoever, other than reported rumor, that U.S. District Attorney Sumner Howard was bribed.

Witnesses told what to say?

Nor is there evidence that witnesses were told what to say. Bagley, as does Brooks, says that "according to . . . family traditions," Nephi Johnson and Jacob Hamblin received letters ordering them to testify and "telling them what to say" (p. 304). "Family traditions" are not evidence. I would like to see the letters. What would they have shown? That witnesses were told to lie about Lee's guilt when Lee was not really guilty? It is unlikely that Lee was not guilty. Although there may indeed have been letters telling witnesses to cooperate, it is doubtful that the letters instructed them what to say.

As further evidence of a deal, Bagley examines Hamblin's role in the second trial. Bagley and the Salt Lake Daily Tribune attack, in particular, Hamblin's testimony that Lee confessed to him and the fact that Hamblin never mentioned the confession to investigating law enforcement officers. They claim that Lee's confession to Hamblin never occurred, and they have suggested that church officials orchestrated Hamblin's testimony to secure Lee's conviction. Brooks agreed with Bagley's later assessment that Hamblin's testimony was selectively truthful and that he "could not remember what he did not want to tell."

The transcript shows that no lawyer in the second trial pushed Hamblin to say very much although Hamblin said he had more to tell. Each side was undoubtedly fearful to ask questions that would elicit previously unknown answers. Either side could have asked the court to order Hamblin, upon pain of contempt, to tell it all. Neither side did. Had I been the prosecutor, I would not want Hamblin to say anything that might possibly implicate Brigham Young because, in that event, I would have followed the same unsuccessful strategy of grandstanding against Brigham Young as did U.S. District Attorneys William Carey and Robert Baskin in the 1875 trial. Similarly, because Hamblin was under the control of the prosecution, as Lee's defense lawyer I would not know what Hamblin would say. In this particular case, less was more. There is no evidence that Hamblin lied; in fact, Hamblin's recent biographer, Hartt Wixom, takes exception to the charge of perjury. Lee's attorney, Bishop, admitted that Hamblin was an honest man, even though Lee contended that Hamblin's testimony was false. The press may have wished that Hamblin had said more, but Hamblin was not talking to the press.

A juror's dream has not the slightest chance of constituting evidence, but Bagley offers it to us as such (p. 306). Blood of the Prophets uses juror Andrew Corry's recollection of a conversation he had with another juror about that juror's dream that Lee would be offered as a scapegoat. When Corry executed his affidavit in 1932 he was eighty-four years old. He had probably been pursued for fifty-six years by persons interested in having him support a particular view. The affidavit looks to be too fine a production.

Corry's affidavit, nonetheless, is compelling to me in a way Blood of the Prophets would not appreciate. Corry does not claim any external pressure to vote for Lee's conviction. He does not mention any pressure by any church authority to vote a particular way. He does not mention a deal. Corry dwells on the scapegoat theory, but that theory was the only defense theory offered by Lee's attorneys and the only possible theory for the jurors to debate. It seems that fifty-six years would have uncovered a claim of church pressure, given Corry's willingness to spill all in his affidavit.

Dictate to jurors?

Blood of the Prophets tells us that William Bishop, Lee's attorney, claims that he had an agreement with local church authorities to select particular persons as jurors (p. 302). According to Bishop:

The attorneys for the defendant had been furnished with a list of the jurymen, and the list was examined by a committee of Mormons, who marked those who would convict with a dash (—), those who would rather not convict with a star (*), and those were certain to acquit John D. Lee, under all circumstances, with two stars (**).

If Bishop asserts, which he really does not, that local church leaders agreed with him to dictate to jurors the outcome of the case, Bishop would be admitting to a crime at the most and grounds for disbarment at the least.

Blood of the Prophets recounts a story by Frank Lee that each juror favorable to Lee's cause would have a "star pinned under his arm" so that Bishop would know "whom to choose" (p. 302). I don't trust this evidence. According to genealogical records, and Bagley does not mention this, Frank Lee would have been barely thirteen years old by the time of the second trial when he claims that this information was conveyed "in the Council meeting." Frank Lee does not say he was at the meeting. A thirteen-year-old boy, one who had lived in isolation his entire life with his mother Rachel, would not likely understand the intricacies of conspiracies to suborn perjury. How many of the dozens or hundreds of potential jurors would have been trained to display their underarms only to Bishop? What would the stars have looked like? Frank Lee undoubtedly misheard secondhand family accounts of Bishop's list of potential jurors.

It certainly is not unusual for an experienced trial lawyer in a small town to compile a list of dozens of known veniremen (someone who is summoned to serve on a jury) and rank them according to their proclivities. A trial lawyer will use many sources to learn facts about these potential jurors. Even an experienced lawyer might get too close to potential jurors in the pretrial phase, as Clarence Darrow learned when he was indicted in 1911 in Los Angeles for allegedly offering money to a potential juror before jurors were called. Bishop probably analyzed the pretrial jury pool. His friendly sources were sympathetic Mormons in the community who probably identified to him and Lee those veniremen who might vote Lee's way.

Bagley and the press also cite as evidence of a deal the fact that an all-Mormon jury was selected for the first trial. Obviously, the argument goes, an all-Mormon jury could be controlled by the church more easily than a part-Mormon jury. Lee's attorney advanced this theory during closing argument. Howard replied by explaining that it was Lee's attorney, not the prosecution, who had struck non-Mormons from the panel. Bishop, said Howard, "was very anxious to get every Gentile off the jury; and I kept striking off Mormons." Because Mormons outnumbered non-Mormons by a huge margin, and because challenges to jurors are typically limited to a certain number per side, it would have been relatively easy for one side to unilaterally control the religious makeup of the jury. According to the uncontested trial transcript, it was Lee's attorney who did this and not, as Bagley argues, Howard. Bishop's unilateral selection of an all-Mormon jury (obviously, a smart thing to do since Mormons had previously voted to acquit) is an important fact in this story that Bagley misses.

Other than the unilateral ability to strike a limited number of jurors, neither party had control over the selection of the jury. According to press reports, the selection process was trilateral, with each side and the court having its say. It would be difficult to corrupt an entire jury pool for the twelve who would be empanelled. In any event, there was no limit to public and press contact with the jurors after the trial. After years of controversy over this case, as far as I know, no juror claimed to have been part of a conspiracy or to have received instructions from church authorities.

Judge and the deal?

Bagley also cites Judge Boreman himself for evidence of a deal:

The deal [Sumner Howard] struck with Brigham Young troubled even Howard. On the first day of the trial, the prosecutor stopped Judge Boreman as he was going to court. "Judge, I have eaten dirt & I have gone down out of sight in dirt & expect to eat more dirt." (p. 301)

Boreman never believed Howard had made a deal, as I will show from correspondence discussed below. Nonetheless, the conversation quoted above says nothing of consequence. Boreman does not claim this to be evidence of any deal and even admits that another witness to the conversation denied it.118 Bagley tells us that Howard's disclosure troubled Boreman, but there is no evidence of this.

Finally, Bagley tells us that "prevailing wisdom had it that the LDS church would dictate the outcome" and that one of Brigham Young's sons, John W. Young, took bets on the Chicago Board of Trade as to the outcome. Bagley's source for these two statements is the muckraking reporter John Beadle (p. 296). No serious scholar would accept as "prevailing wisdom" the conclusions of reporters for modern newspapers. Why should we accept John Beadle for "prevailing wisdom?" Admittedly, John W. Young may have been a colorful character, but I wouldn't rely on Beadle for the account of bets taken on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Evidence against the deal

Evidence Refuting the Deal, Which Bagley Ignores. In the analysis above, we have seen that the U.S. district attorney would never have entered into a deal to thwart justice because he would have known it would have been unenforceable. We have also seen that Bagley's evidence of a deal is without foundation.

Looking at the evidence refuting the notion of a deal, we find it is substantial. For years after the start of the Lee trial, until at least as late as 1884, federal prosecutors and investigators actively sought to bring other massacre participants to justice. Had the church and federal prosecutors struck a deal that only Lee would be prosecuted, we should expect that all parties to the deal would act thereafter in a manner consistent with a deal. None of the parties acted in such a manner.

The Salt Lake Daily Tribune reports the church's call for continued prosecutions on 23 September 1876. A few days later and after Lee's conviction, the Tribune on 27 September 1876 published a summary of its grounds for believing that Howard had cut a deal with the church. One day after the Tribunes accusation, and most likely in response to the Tribunes charges, Howard described to the U.S. attorney general meetings with the church in which he lobbied for assistance in locating witnesses. "That aid was given." Howard also told the church authorities that he had no present evidence against them. Howard also complained of political intrigue from former prosecutors to malign his successful efforts.

On 4 and 5 October 1876, U.S. District Attorney Howard wrote to U.S. Attorney General Alphonso Taft and explained his plans to arrest Haight, Higbee, and Stewart. Judge Boreman endorsed the 5 October letter with a note of his own (reproduced on p. 241) to Taft.

The letter from Boreman to the U.S. attorney general shows several things that are fundamentally inconsistent with Bagley's theories about the deal. On the one hand, Bagley tells us that Boreman and Howard were troubled with the deal Howard had to make to thwart justice for other perpetrators (p. 301). On the other hand, the official correspondence shows that Boreman endorsed Howard's plan for further pursuit and arrest. Boreman agreed with Howard's progress. Under Bagley's view of the facts, Boreman should have called for Howard's ouster. It seems Bagley has this completely wrong.

The evidence from official sources mounts against Bagley's and Brooks's theory of a deal. Taft authorized additional personnel to support Howard's and Boreman's request. U.S. Marshal William Nelson told Alphonso Taft on 19 December 1876 of the discovery of physical evidence in California, asking the Justice Department help to retrieve it. On 12 February 1877, Howard told Taft that Howard had located a possible eyewitness to the massacre, a Fancher child, now an adult languishing in the penitentiary for robbery. Howard asked Taft for help from the Justice Department to corroborate the witness's identity. The secretary of war responded with the information requested.

On 23 February 1877, Boreman communicated to Howard a desire to spend more money on the marshal's efforts to intercept the other perpetrators before they fled to New Mexico. Howard and Nelson wrote to Taft on 3 March to urge that "the importance of availing ourselves of every reasonable means to bring others equally guilty to trial—is apparent. The trial of Lee has resulted in developments that give us a reasonable hope that the others—if arrested can be convicted."

Taft's successor, Attorney General Charles Devens, responded to the correspondence of the third and questioned whether a five-hundred-dollar reward requested for the arrest of Haight, Higbee, and Stewart would be wasted. Lee was executed four days later on 23 March 1877.

Three days after the execution, Howard recommended to Devens that undercover officers be used to effect the remaining arrests. On 2 May 1877, after learning that George C. Bates, Lee's former attorney, wished a special appointment to attempt the apprehension of Haight, Higbee, and Stewart, Howard complained to Devens that Bates's proposal was "another of Brigham Young's . . . games to thwart the officers" in their arrests. Why would Howard have condemned the "games" of Brigham Young to thwart further arrests if Howard had agreed, as Bagley and Brooks say, to forgo all arrests?

On 20 October 1877, over one year after the deal Bagley claims the government made to thwart justice, Howard's assistant and Boreman petitioned the president of the United States for additional appropriations for a special agent.134 Howard wrote Devens, disagreeing with his assistant, asking that the money instead be spent on undercover agents who could approach the fugitives by stealth.

After Howard resigned in February 1878 to pursue a respected career in law and politics in Michigan, federal efforts to arrest Haight, Higbee, and Stewart continued. Boreman wrote to Devens on 1 January 1879 with a request for additional appropriations. "The arrest of these men has been delayed so long that the people are not anticipating any effort in that way. This then would be a suitable time to make the arrests." Eleven months later, Devens approved the request. In 1884, or almost seven years after Bagley claims a deal was made to frustrate further prosecutions, an acting attorney general confirmed Utah inquiries from the U.S. marshal that reward money was still offered for the arrests of Haight, Higbee, and Stewart.

Thus all of this post-Lee-conviction activity by the prosecutor's office and the judiciary would have made no sense whatsoever if all agreed and understood there was a deal to thwart justice. What is the answer from Young critics and Lee advocates on this point? Was it all a subterfuge involving two federal prosecutors, a federal judge, several U.S. marshals, a secretary of war, and at least three U.S. attorneys general?

Dwyer's work: Bagley's manipulation of source

When Bagley gets to this postconviction official action, his analysis is stunted, missing nearly all the correspondence mentioned above. He relies solely on a doctoral dissertation by Rev. Robert Joseph Dwyer later published as The Gentile Comes to Utah: A Study in Religious and Social Conflict (1862—1890). This is a weak work, at least when it discusses post-Lee official action, because Dwyer lacked many of the official sources I have cited above. Nonetheless, with the limited sources Dwyer possessed, he does not conclude that a deal had been struck between prosecutors and the church.

What annoyed me most about Bagley's use of Dwyer's work is that Bagley chose to cut and paste Dwyer's own words into Blood of the Prophets although Dwyer does not reach the same conclusions Bagley does. The dissonance in some of Dwyer's fuzzy logic becomes incomprehensible when Bagley repeats almost verbatim the Dwyer logic as original thought.

The Jailers and the Gilman Affidavit

When Bagley does get specific with Dwyer's work, he focuses on a dispute between a claimed jailer, assistant U.S. Marshal Edwin Gilman, and U.S. District Attorney Sumner Howard (p. 308). Relying solely on Dwyer's secondary work, Bagley tells us that Gilman's affidavit reported that Howard at the trial intentionally suppressed Lee testimony that would have implicated Brigham Young. Bagley, however, does not refer to Gilman's affidavit because Dwyer lacks one and, hence, Bagley does not have it. After telling us about Gilman, Bagley reiterates the suggestion that "the Mormons had corrupted Howard" (p. 309).

It is curious that when Bagley discusses the Gilman affidavit he relies on a secondary source that never had the affidavit. The affidavit in full, and Sumner Howard's response to the affidavit, were published in the New York Herald (James G. Bennett's paper) on 12 April 1877. The day before, the Salt Lake Daily Tribune had published Howard's response on 11 April.

In his affidavit, Gilman declared that he was a jailer in Beaver. At Howard's request, Lee prepared a confession, and "as read to and by me, charged Brigham Young with direct complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as an accessory before the fact, that Brigham Young had written letters to Dame and Haight, at Parowan directing them to see that the emigrants were all put to death."

Bagley, however, does not tell us about Howard's rebuttal to Gilman's charge. Howard's rebuttal seems irrefutable, and indeed, I am unaware that Gilman ever attempted a refutation of the rebuttal. Howard says that no Gilman affidavit was ever found at the Justice Department (the New York Herald reported it had been filed) and that Gilman disappeared so nobody could interview him. Howard said that Gilman was never a jailer at Beaver. Howard said that Gilman never had an opportunity to speak to Lee and thus Gilman would never have been in a position to hear any purported confession. Howard reported that "Gilman is a notorious liar; has been impeached here in Court, and there are not ten men in the Territory acquainted with him who would take his oath or word." Further, the "confession of Lee has not been sold, altered, suppressed or in any other manner put to an improper use." Because the Gilman affair is Bagley's chief source for a "deal," I find it remarkable that he does not even possess a copy of the Gilman affidavit.

A better account

A more accurate account of the relationship between Howard and the jailers can be seen from an earlier 21 March 1877 article in the New York Herald that reported that the jailers were upset that Lee refused to implicate his accomplices. Howard had given up trying to get information "as was expected and as he indirectly promised." Nowhere is there any shred of evidence that Lee told Howard something that was not published in these newspapers. Nowhere is Gilman mentioned in the earlier article. Nowhere do we read any corroboration of the statements contained in the supposed Gilman affidavit. Justice of the peace and jailer Benjamin Spear had claimed one month earlier that Judge Boreman and other fellow officers were either timid or bribed by "Brigham Young's blood stained coin." Spear claimed obliquely that John D. Lee had more to say and had so told Spear at one time, but Spear wouldn't get specific about his charges. Spear also complained that John D. Lee was permitted to cohabit with his wives.

U.S. Attorney General Devens asked Howard to come to Washington to explain the jailers' charges, specifically focusing only on a charge that the jailers were selling a confession for profit. Nowhere in Devens's letter does Devens give any credence to Gilman's or Spears's vague claims that Howard suppressed evidence that implicated Brigham Young. Devens would have mentioned such an incendiary charge had there been any credibility to it. On 16 April 1877, Howard told Devens that "I will state here that the allegations of Gilman are cruel wicked and infamous—without the least grain of truth." Bagley tells us that Howard went to Washington to respond to the charges against him, but the official correspondence shows that Devens accepted Howard's explanation and reversed his request to see Howard.

Summary of charges of a deal

To summarize, the official correspondence shows years of prosecutorial effort to apprehend massacre perpetrators. This effort overwhelms the meager and faulty story Bagley puts together from the Gilman affair. To rely upon secondary material for the "deal" theory, particularly where primary material was published in the national press, is not good scholarship. Bagley's lack of knowledge of the official correspondence discussing prosecutorial effort is a significant impediment to his credibility.

An alternate view

What really happened between Howard and the Church? Let me suggest a plausible explanation for the facts that have led laypersons in the past to think there was a deal to make Lee a scapegoat. After the first trial failed and Sumner Howard replaced the prior prosecutors, the Salt Lake Daily Tribune peppered its editorial column with charges of prosecutorial bungling. The paper charged the prosecutors with grandstanding against church authorities and failing to adduce specific evidence against Lee. U.S. District Attorney Howard, not willing to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors, decided he needed a different strategy and slate of witnesses. However, many of the desired witnesses could not be found. Howard met with church officials to lobby their support to encourage witnesses to come forward. Howard assured church authorities that he sought only justice and that he had no evidence against Brigham Young or George A. Smith. Nor did Howard give up on Brigham Young; both Orson F. Whitney and the New York Herald reported that Howard offered Lee a full pardon in exchange for evidence against Brigham Young. Church authorities probably got the word out to witnesses to encourage them to cooperate.

Few of the witnesses in the first trial testified in the second. Howard did not call Klingensmith, who had turned state's evidence in the previous trial. This indicates to me that Howard did not want to repeat the errors of his predecessors. Howard probably asked the church to have a nominal presence at the trial. Daniel Wells agreed to testify, and he did so. Ostensibly, Wells's testimony was necessary to show that Lee was not a high church authority. The night before his testimony, Wells preached a fiery sermon in Parowan demanding justice, but not necessarily against Lee. (I have not seen the text of that sermon.) The Deseret News also published editorials demanding justice. The jurors deliberated. According to the Corry affidavit, the decision was not an easy one to make. No external force influenced the jurors, other than the social difficulty of convicting one's own. But, in the end, Lee was convicted. Investigations continued against other perpetrators, but they secreted themselves effectively in the wilds of the desert. No doubt the other perpetrators had plenty of Mormon friends and family willing to assist with their evasion.

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Source(s) of the criticism

Critical sources

Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 217–235. David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847–1896 (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998), 243–252. (bias and errors) Review Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, (Secker & Warburg, 2003), 209.

Did Brigham Young or the Church interfere with the trial of John D. Lee?

Prosecutorial misconduct was likely responsible for the failure of the first trial

Critics charge that the institutional Church interfered with the first trial of John D. Lee and others to prevent convictions in 1875-1876.

Prosecutorial misconduct was likely responsible for the failure of the first trial. Lee was not tied to any criminal conduct, and prosecutors' desire to blame Brigham Young—without evidence—for the massacre led to the trial's failure.

One reviewer described the difficulties with this theory:

Second hand evidence

Blood of the Prophets argues that the church was guilty of obstructing the prosecution of the 1875 and 1876 trials of John D. Lee. Yet Bagley errs in his analysis of the events of the trials. He fails, with a few exceptions for the first trial only, to rely upon the actual transcripts. Instead, he relies upon exposés. These secondhand accounts are not accurate and have serious errors of omission and editorial addition. In particular, I object to Bagley's reliance upon William Bishop's Mormonism Unveiled for the second trial. Bishop's stenographer dropped and changed testimony in places. Abraham Lincoln's biographers have recognized the difficulty of using press accounts as they reconstructed the accessory-after-the-fact trial of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who set John Wilkes Booth's leg. In contrast to Bagley, neither Brooks nor Leonard Arrington relied on press accounts for their analyses of the Lee trial.

Blood of the Prophets also relies on the memoirs of Judge Jacob Boreman for his impressions of the trial. Except for perhaps the demeanor of witnesses, a judge's observations of witnesses could not add anything to the official transcript. Boreman's reminiscences demonstrate some real problems. With not a shred of evidence other than the speculation circulated by others, Boreman said he believed that high Mormon officials communicated death threats to witnesses of the massacre and that ordinary members of the church believed they were authorized to commit perjury by reason of the vows they took in the church's Endowment House. None of that is reflected in the trial transcript. Arrington opined that Boreman was prepared to believe the worst about the Mormons and that his naïveté made him clay in the hands of other federal anti-Mormon fanatics.

1875 trial

Turning to the events of the first trial in 1875, there is no evidence that the church obstructed justice. This trial mistried with a hung jury, to the universal denunciation of the church in the non-Mormon press. All Mormon jurors and one "backslider" voted to acquit. Three non-Mormons voted to convict (p. 296). Not a single witness tied Lee to any criminal activity, including former Mormon Bishop Philip Klingensmith, who turned state's evidence. The prosecutors, William C. Carey and Robert Baskin, used the trial to grandstand against Brigham Young. Even the [generally anti-Mormon] Salt Lake Daily Tribune admitted that the trial failure resulted from the prosecutors' "utter neglect of the business" and "disgraceful lethargy." [end of cited material]

V

Articles about the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Overview

Overview Historical summary of the Mountain Meadows Massacre Perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre Others involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Did Brigham Young order the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

There is substantial evidence that Brigham Young did not order the massacre. Will Bagley (and, following him, the author of One Nation Under Gods) have distorted the contents of the Huntington diary and ignored other evidence.

ONUG makes two related claims:

1. Brigham Young ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
2. The Dimick Huntington diary entry proves that Brigham offered the natives cattle to carry out the massacre.

Both of these claims are false.

Responding to Bagley (and ONUG)

The book's argument is essentially identical (if less detailed) to Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets. Bagley's analysis has been savaged by multiple reviewers. (See "Further Reading" in main article on Mountain Meadows Massacre.)

Wrote attorney Robert Crockett of Bagley's argument:

Bagley's "troubling new evidence," [which the author uses though he does not cite Bagley, since Bagley's book came out after the ONUG hardback edition] which separates his work from Juanita Brooks's, is simply a diary entry, dated 1 September 1857, in which Indian interpreter Dimick Huntington describes a meeting purportedly held between himself, Brigham Young, and twelve Indian chiefs:

Kanosh the Pahvant Chief[,] Ammon & wife (Walkers Brother) & 11 Pahvants came into see B & D & find out about the soldiers. Tutseygubbit a Piede chief over 6 Piedes Bands Youngwuols another Piede chief & I gave them all the cattle that had gone to Cal[.] the southa rout[.] it made them open their eyes[.] they sayed that you have told us not to steal[.] so I have but now they have come to fight us & you for when they kill us then they will kill you[.] they sayed the[y] was afraid to fight the Americans & so would raise grain & we might fight. (cf. p. 114)

For Bagley this cryptic entry proves that "the atrocity was not a tragedy but a premeditated criminal act initiated in Great Salt Lake City" (p. 378). Blood of the Prophets tells us that "if any court in the American West (excepting, of course, one of Utah's probate courts) had seen the evidence [the Dimick Huntington diary] contained, the only debate among the jurors would have been when, where, and how high to hang Brigham Young" (p. 425 n. 42).

This scrap of evidence cannot support Bagley's conclusions, particularly in light of contemporaneous evidence. Brigham Young, if it was truly he who spoke, did not refer to a specific emigrant train. Instead, on that day and on many others, as I will demonstrate, he asked Indian tribal leaders to help scatter the cattle of the army and of all emigrants on the trail in front of the army in order to completely close the trail. As historian Norman Furniss observed fifty years ago, "early in the war at least, the Church's leaders had a deliberate policy of seeking military assistance from the Indians." When Brigham Young told the Indian tribes he wanted assistance in fighting the Americans, he meant only the army.

Bagley tells us that the language in Huntington's diary entry for 1 September 1857 implies an instruction for attack on the Fancher train. Why then did Dimick Huntington use the same language elsewhere with Indian tribal leaders who could have had no geographic proximity to the Fancher train? For instance, two days earlier in Huntington's diary, 30 August 1857, Huntington wrote:

I [Huntington] told them that the Lord had come out of his Hiding place & they had to commence their work[.] I gave them all the Beef cattle & horses that was on the Road to CalAfornia[,] the North Rout[,] that they must put them into the mountains & not kill any thing as Long as they can help it but when they do Kill[,] take the old ones & not kill the cows or young ones.

When Huntington talks about not killing anything "as Long as they can help it" he is talking about "cows." He asked the northern Indians for help to run cattle off the northern California route upon which the Fancher train would never tread. Following the massacre, Indian agent Garland Hurt—certainly no friend of the Mormons—noted the same requests were made to the northern Snake Indians. T. B. H. Stenhouse also confirms that running the cattle off was a general strategy used successfully against the army. Thus, Brigham Young's 1 September 1857 comment: "I gave them all the cattle" can only mean one thing. He offered the Indians all the cattle they could scatter that were owned by the army.

Let us look at who was present at that 1 September 1857 meeting because this bears on Bagley's theory about instructions to destroy the Fancher train. Most of the Indians present led tribes that had no geographic proximity to the Fancher train, as massacre historian and attorney Robert Briggs has pointed out. Only two or three of the twelve chieftains present might have had some connection to the tribes that participated in the massacre. Tutsegabit and Youngwuds were the two Southern Paiute chiefs present in Brigham Young's office whose tribes resided in Iron County (p. 113).

Not only were the wrong people in the 1 September 1857 meeting, the participants were probably talking about a geographic area far from the location of the Fancher train. I have substantial doubt that Brigham Young's reference to the "south rout[e]" on 1 September meant anything more than the entire route south of present-day Wyoming upon which the army was advancing. With contemporaneous descriptions of the south route referring to the entire road south of Lander Pass in Wyoming, it is unreasonable to conclude that Brigham Young had some other meaning for "south rout[e]."

Further, Bagley's chronology is problematic to the point of impossibility. Tutsegabit and Youngwuds did not have time to get from Salt Lake City to Mountain Meadows and return to Salt Lake City by 16 September 1857 or, as Huntington says, by 10 September 1857. Blood of the Prophets tells us these Indian chiefs were surprised when they were purportedly told to massacre the Fancher train on 1 September but that they recovered from this surprise, and within five days (without horses, no less) traveled three hundred miles to organize and lead the first wave of assaults, assembling for the assault on the evening of 5 September for a predawn attack the next morning. In contrast, John D. Lee claims he rushed on horseback to Salt Lake City to make a report to Brigham Young of the massacre, saying that "I was on the way about ten days," and Lee did not get started for ten days. With excellent and replenished horseflesh, it took James Haslam three days to travel the same distance with Isaac Haight's request for instructions. Wilford Woodruff records Tutsegabit's presence to be ordained an elder in Salt Lake City, certainly not an emergency, five days after the massacre concluded or, as the Huntington diary says, in the middle of the massacre. It is implausible to think that Tutsegabit and Youngwuds made this round-trip in such a short period of time. Moreover, neither Tutsegabit nor Youngwuds were reported to be at the massacre.

Thus, I disagree with Bagley's effort to render what is simple and relatively benign (general cattle running) to what is complex and malicious (killing emigrants). The developed law of evidence cautions against reaching conclusions about wrongful conduct from a set of facts that could explain more benign actions. As Robert Briggs asks in his Sunstone essay, with twenty-five hundred troops approaching, why would Brigham Young concern himself with forty armed men in the Arkansas train?

Brigham's later account

Thomas Kane, a close non-member friend of the Mormons who had often defended their interests, asked Brigham Young about the Massacre.

In 1859, U.S. Attorney General Jeremiah Black, a friend of Kane, requested through Kane a written statement from Young regarding his knowledge, as the territorial governor, of the infamous Mountain Meadows massacre, a September 1857 tragedy that occurred in southern Utah when Mormons with the assistance of a few Paiutes attacked and murdered about one hundred twenty unarmed men, women, and children. Young responded to this request on December 15, 1859, with a long letter that contained one of his few expressions regarding this terrible episode:

"Neither yourself, nor any one acquainted with me, will require my assurance that, had I been apprized of the intended onslaught at the Meadows, I should have used such efforts for its prevention as the time, distance, and my influence and facilities, would have permitted. The horrifying event transpired without my knowledge, except from after report, and the recurring thought of it ever causes a shudder in my feelings.

It is a subject exclusively within the province of judicial proceedings, and I have known and still prefer to know nothing touching the affair, until I in common with the people, learn the facts as they may be developed before those whose right it is to investigate and adjudicate thereupon. Colonel, you may think this a singular statement, but the facts of the massacre of men, women, and children are so shocking and crucifying to my feelings, that I have not suffered myself to hear anymore about them than the circumstances of conversation compelled."

The letter also outlined what Governor Young's course had been during this critical period, suggesting why he did not pursue any specific course of action. Again, Kane was a trusted confidant to whom Young could convey his deepest feelings.

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Source(s) of the criticism—Brigham Young ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

Critical sources

Richard Abanes, One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 245 ( Index of claims ) Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 137. Sally Denton, American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, (Secker & Warburg, 2003), 141-158.

Other Resources on Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Ensign, "The Mountain Meadows Massacre"

Richard G. Turley, Jr. (Managing Director, Family and Church History Department),  Ensign, (September 2007)

President Young’s express message of reply to Haight, dated September 10, arrived in Cedar City two days after the massacre. His letter reported recent news that no U.S. troops would be able to reach the territory before winter. "So you see that the Lord has answered our prayers and again averted the blow designed for our heads," he wrote.

"In regard to emigration trains passing through our settlements," Young continued, "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."

Click here to view the complete article

Brigham Young ordered Mountain Meadows Massacre?

Summary: It is claimed that Brigham Young ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

• • Amerindians as instrument of vengeance?—
    Brief Summary: It is claimed that nineteenth-century Mormons saw Indians as a divine weapon given them to wreak vengeance on their persecutors. These beliefs, it is claimed, led to the Church and Brigham Young using the Indians for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. (Click here for full article)
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  • Huntington diary says Indians to "raise allies" for the planned massacre?—
    Brief Summary: Will Bagley claims that Dimmick Huntington's journal discusses Indians raising "allies" to help in the massacre at Mountain Meadows which he claims Brigham is orchestrating. (Click here for full article)
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  • Indian chief Arapeen given booty from Massacre?—
    Brief Summary: Brigham Young is claimed to have given the Indian chief Arapeen spoils from the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Click here for full article)
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  • Indian chiefs Tutsegabit and Youngwuds sent by Brigham to Mountain Meadows? (Click here for full article)
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  • Indian chief Tutsegabit "rewarded" for massacre with priesthood ordination?—
    Brief Summary: The author claims that Brigham met with two Indian chiefs (Tutsegabit and Youngwuds) on 1 September, who then participated in the massacre and later "rewarded" Indian chief Tutsegabit for his role in the massacre by ordaining him to the priesthood. (Click here for full article)
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  • Brigham's letter mysteriously lost?—
    Brief Summary: It is claimed that Brigham Young's letter telling Mormons in southern Utah to leave the immigrants alone is of dubious providence. (Click here for full article)
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  • Brigham Young ordered MMM memorial demolished?—
    Brief Summary: It is claimed that when Brigham Young visited the site in 1860 and saw the monument, he "ordered the monument and cross torn down" and demolished. (Click here for full article)
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  • Brigham Young and the prosecution of Mountain Meadows Massacre (Click here for full article)
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    • Church blocked prosecution?—
      Brief Summary: It is claimed that actions of the institutional Church and/or local Mormons prevented federal officials from prosecuting those guilty of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. (Click here for full article)
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    • Church interference in trials?—
      Brief Summary: It is claimed that Brigham Young blocked prosecution of those who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre. (Click here for full article)
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    • Deal with Brigham Young for massacre prosecution?—
      Brief Summary: It is claimed that only a corrupt "deal" with Brigham Young allowed prosecutors to charge and convict anyone with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. (Click here for full article)
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    • Frank Lee evidence?—
      Brief Summary: Blood of the Prophets tells us that William Bishop, Lee's attorney, claims that he had an agreement with local church authorities to select particular persons as jurors (p. 302). If Bishop asserts, which he really does not, that local church leaders agreed with him to dictate to jurors the outcome of the case, Bishop would be admitting to a crime at the most and grounds for disbarment at the least. (Click here for full article)
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    • John D. Lee scapegoated? (Click here for full article)
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    • Judge and the deal? (Click here for full article)
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    • Prosecutors bribed? (Click here for full article)
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    • Prosecution dictated to jurors? (Click here for full article)
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    • Witnesses told what to say? (Click here for full article)
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    • Orders to starve Gentiles? (Click here for full article)
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    • Rape by Albert Hamblin?—
      Brief Summary: It is claimed that Jacob Hamblin's son Albert raped two women at the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and Jacob was later to blame these on John D. Lee. (Click here for full article)
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September Dawn film (2007)

Summary: Does the film about the Mountain Meadows Massacre accurately portray the historical events?

Brigham and the Mormon Reformation

Summary: Similar charges against Brigham Young stem from the Mormon Reformation period.

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Source(s) of the criticism

Critical sources

MormonThink.com website (as of 28 April 2012). Page: http://mormonthink.com/joseph-smith-polygamy.htm

Notes