Was Brigham Young involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre? Ep. 78

Check out Part 1 to this episode here: https://bit.ly/3dVeYSy

Transcript of this episode + notes on our website: [We’ll put a link here]
Great stuff on Brigham Young’s investigations of the massacre: https://bit.ly/2KgsXWa / https://bit.ly/3cppa4K
The meddling of John D. Lee’s defense attorney: https://bit.ly/2Vird4N
How much did Brigham Young know about the truth?: https://bit.ly/3cppa4K / https://bit.ly/2RSX6io
Read about the first trial of John D. Lee: https://bit.ly/2R8EhHI
Did a Latter-day Saint jury refuse to indict the perpetrators in an 1859 investigation?: https://bit.ly/2RTXnlc
What about the claims of Will Bagley’s “Blood of the Prophets” book?: https://bit.ly/2VihWtC
Read the deposition of Brigham Young here: https://bit.ly/3402ViW
Collected material concerning MMM in Church History Catalog: https://bit.ly/39B7QrI
Newspaper report of Lee’s 1877 lengthy confession: https://bit.ly/3aCDNRH
“Brigham Young and the Expansion of the Mormon Faith,” by Thomas Alexander: https://bit.ly/3cA1riw
“Problems with Mountain Meadows Massacre Sources,” by Richard Turley: https://bit.ly/2yuGAya
“Mountain Meadows Massacre: Collected Legal Papers, Selected Trial Records and Aftermath” (Volume 2): https://bit.ly/2Kxkuhv

NOTES:

-What happened to the 17 children who survived the attack? Initially, they lived with families in Cedar City. After a year or two, the federal government took them and returned them to relatives in Arkansas.

-Who were the 9 men that were indicted? See “A Seething Cauldron of Controversy: The First Trial of John D. Lee, 1875,” by Robert H. Briggs. https://bit.ly/2R8EhHI

-Even after Brigham knew that white men were involved in the crime (in some form or another), he reportedly told the man who had given him the report (Jacob Hamblin, in summer of 1858) to keep it quiet until a federal investigation figured things out. The official story continued to be that the massacre was a Paiute attack. But after Hamblin’s report, Brigham initiated the first of many ecclesiastical investigations in the matter (remember, he was no longer the governor. He’d been replaced with non-Latter-day Saint Alfred Cumming). It’s unclear if Brigham told Hamblin to keep quiet about some of these details because he wanted to cover up the truth, or simply to avoid spreading rumor until the reports could be verified. Either way, Brigham still gets dinged for being less than forthcoming on other occasions. More on this here: https://bit.ly/3eEv0B3

-What else was going on in this first trial? “Historian Robert J. Dwyer concluded that the prosecution’s ‘scarcely veiled object’ was to ‘extract from Lee a confession that would afford grounds for an indictment of Brigham Young himself.’ … When it became clear that Lee’s proffered confession did not go far enough to satisfy the prosecutors, they rejected the confession and withdrew their offer of a plea bargain. Instead, they decided to try Lee for murder stemming from his role in the massacre.” Source: https://bit.ly/2R8EhHI

-What was the result of John D. Lee’s first trial? John D. Lee’s first trial jury was composed of 8 Latter-day Saints and 4 non-Latter-day Saints. All 8 Saints and 1 non-Saint (possibly a “Jack-Mormon”) voted to acquit Lee. The trial ended with a hung jury. Some people have looked for a conspiracy amongst the jurors (after all, isn’t it just too convenient that all 8 Saints voted to acquit?), but the content of the trial clearly reveals that prosecuting attorney Robert Baskin’s closing remarks were not aimed at assigning ultimate guilt to Lee, but rather to the Latter-day Saint theocratic system. Baskin insulted Latter-day Saints, calling them “craven cowards,” “criminals,” “serfs,” and “slaves.” He claimed the organization of the Church had “destroyed their manhood,” among other things. It’s really no surprise they voted for acquittal. And ultimately, Lee really was not the subject of this first trial. He was certainly the face of it, but it was really the Church’s theocracy that was on trial. There is evidence to suggest that the prosecution didn’t expect to win the case, and that their true aim was to weaken the Church in the court of public opinion, which succeeded. Read Baskin’s statements here: https://bit.ly/2R8EhHI

-John D. Lee was sort of all over the place with his reports about Brigham Young. Some of his official confessions express some pretty strong assertions about Brigham Young that make for very flashy and impactful quotes for those seeking to implicate Brigham. The following source outlines some of the issues with these confessions that make his statements awfully suspect: https://bit.ly/2yuGAya / https://bit.ly/2Vird4N

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