Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer

"In 1858, a year after the massacre, Brigham Young reluctantly agreed to admit federal troops into Utah and to step down as territorial governor, bringing an end to the threat of all-out war between Saints and the United States. But persistent rumors that Mormons had committed unspeakable atrocities against the Fancher wagon train kept drifting up from the southern settlements, threatening the fragile peace.

President Buchanan's secretary of war ordered army brevet major James H. Carlton to investigate the matter. Arriving at the Mountain Meadows in the spring of 1859, Carlton was sickened to discover that, nearly two years after the event, the valley was littered with skulls, bones, clumps of women's hair, and scraps of children's clothing bleaching in the sun. An army surgeon reported that many of the skulls 'bore marks of violence, being pierced with bullet holes, or shattered with heavy blows, or cleft with some sharp-edged instrument.' The nature of the bullet wounds, he concluded, 'showed that fire-arms had been discharged close to the head.'

'There has been a great and fearful crime perpetrated,' Carlton declared. His soldiers gathered up whatever bones they could find, interred them in a common grave, and then laboriously hauled stones from the surrounding hillsides to build a massive, if crude, monument above it. At the apex of this rock pile, which was twelve feet high and fifty feet in circumference, they placed a wooden cross inscribed with the epigraph 'Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.'

In May 1861, Brigham Young happened upon this memorial as he was passing through the meadow during a tour of his southern settlements. According to Apostle Wilford Woodruff, who was accompanying the prophet, when Brigham read the inscription on the cross he pondered it for a short while and then proposed an emendation: 'Vengeance is mine,' the prophet smugly asserted, 'and I have taken a little.' A moment later one of the Saints in his entourage threw a rope over the cross and pulled it down, while others began dismantling the stones and scattering them. By the time Brigham's party departed the Mountain Meadows, the monument to the slaughtered emigrants had been obliterated." (231-232)


"The men who run the modern LDS Church deem the history of their religion to be sacred, and have long tried to retain tight proprietary control over how that history is presented to the world. Indeed, LDS leaders have explicitly stated that they believe accounts of Mormon history should be, above all else, 'faith promoting' -- that is to say, accounts of Mormon history should be celebratory rather than critical, and should downplay, omit, or deny sensitive or unsavory aspects of that history. As Apostle Boyd Packer (presently second in line to become LDS President and Prophet) declared in an infamous 1981 speech, 'There is a temptation . . . to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith-promoting or not. Some things that are true are not very useful. . . . In an effort to be objective, impartial, and scholarly, a writer or a teacher may unwittingly be giving equal time to the adversary. . . . In the Church we are not neutral. We are one-sided. There is a war going on, and we are engaged in it.' This war is for the minds and souls of the earth's population -- a war that Latter-day Saints wage with all the resources at their disposal." (362)

(New York: Anchor Books, 2004)