Scott Woodward: In May 2023, Richard Turley and Barbara Jones Brown published a book through Oxford University Press entitled Vengeance is Mine which documents the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, including the efforts of church and civic leaders in southern Utah to conceal their involvement in the atrocity through witness silencing and misinformation, as well as evading or stalling investigations by both government agencies and church organizations by lack of cooperation and political maneuvering. They also chronicle details about the nine individuals who were ultimately indicted, the five who were apprehended, and John D. Lee, who ultimately faced execution. Today on Church History Matters we sit down with both Richard Turley and Barbara Jones Brown to discuss their important book, to hear their informed insights and perspectives, and to consider what Latter-day Saints and others can learn from this tragedy and how to productively move forward. I’m Scott Woodward, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, and today, Casey and I dive into our eighth episode in this series on peace and violence in Latter-day Saint history. Now, let’s get into it.

Casey Griffiths: Hello, Scott.

Scott Woodward: Hi, Casey. How are you, sir?

Casey Griffiths: We’re back here again. We’re getting close to the end of our series on peace and violence among 19th century Latter-day Saints.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. We’ve been talking about some pretty rough things. Most recently we’ve been going through some of the painful details of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which—Casey, this is a painful topic. It’s a topic that fits into category three of how you’ve been walking us through peace and violence, that is, violence committed by Latter-day Saints—kind of instigated by us. And we’ve been the victims, category one; we have hit back when other people have attacked us, Category 2; but Category 3, this one’s really tough as we try to think about how to frame this and how to own it. I’m very excited for what we want to talk about today. We actually brought on, I think—is it safe to say, Casey, the world’s leading experts on this topic are here with us today?

Casey Griffiths: I honestly can’t think of two people I would more want to talk to about than Mountain Meadows.

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: We’ve got with us Rick Turley and Barbara Jones Brown, who are the authors of a book that just came out last year: it’s called Vengeance is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath. This is part two of a two-part study. The first book came out in—Rick, when was it? 2008? Is that right?

Rick Turley: 2008, yes.

Casey Griffiths: 2008, and then the sequel was worth the wait. First book basically covers the events of the massacre, and then the second book covers the aftermath of the massacre with a little, brief recap of the massacre told from some different perspectives, so—it’s an excellent book. Let me read your bios just so we can get straight to the discussion here. Richard E. Turley, Jr. was a longtime historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a co-author of Massacre at Mountain Meadows. He’s the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award and the Historic Preservation Medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Turley also represented relatives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre victims in their successful petition of the federal government to grant national historic landmark status to the atrocity site, and he lives in Farmington, Utah. So there’s Rick, and I should briefly mention your co-authors on the first volume, who are Ron Walker and Glen Leonard. Ron’s passed on now, and I think Glen’s retired. Is that right, Rick?

Rick Turley: That’s correct.

Casey Griffiths: And then your co-author on this volume is Barbara Jones Brown. Barbara is the director of Signature Books publishing and a former executive director of the Mormon History Association. She was the content editor of Massacre at Mountain Meadows, the first volume. She holds an MA in American History from the University of Utah and a BA in Journalism and English from Brigham Young University. While researching her genealogy after beginning work on Vengeance is Mine, Brown discovered that, like earlier Mountain Meadows Massacre historian Juanita Brooks, she is a direct descendant of one of its perpetrators. She lives in Park City, Utah. Welcome!

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: We’re glad to have both of you here with us.

Barbara Jones Brown: Thank you.

Rick Turley: Thank you.

Barbara Jones Brown: Thanks for having us on.

Scott Woodward: Now, Barbara, this is my first time meeting you. It’s so good to meet you, and Richard Turley, he has been kind to me ever since I was a teenage boy, punk kid in his house. I was—I’m friends with his daughter, Jen, and now your granddaughter, Elise, is one of our favorite BYU–Idaho students. She has come and watched our kids, and she’s so great. Rick, good to see you again as well.

Rick Turley: Thank you, Scott.

Scott Woodward: Yeah, you were doing church history before I even knew that it was cool, and now here I am these years later trying to still learn from you, and it’s been so fun and so good, so.

Casey Griffiths: I want to put in a plug for Barbara. Barbara was executive director of MHA for a long time and implemented a lot of great things. Like, there was a seer stone for a while. Is that still a thing, Barbara, that the seer stone gets passed?

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah. I can’t take credit for introducing that: that was former MHA president Dean May, who was a professor of history at the University of Utah. He went up to MHA’s founding father, Leonard Arrington’s, farm up in Idaho, got a rock off of Leonard Arrington’s farm, and then put it on a plaque and called it the MHA seer stone.

Scott Woodward: Oh, boy.

Barbara Jones Brown: And then I just kind of—we just kind of brought it back. It was president—Paul Reeve was president, and I was the new executive director when we brought that back, that every new president of MHA receives that MHA seer stone from the prior president. That’s how we had that ceremony of passing on the leadership torch, if you will.

Casey Griffiths: And the ceremony I was at, the ghost of Leonard Arrington actually started typing on a typewriter. Like, it was—

Barbara Jones Brown: It was Leonard’s typewriter. We borrowed Leonard’s typewriter from his daughter, and we had the typewriter play and pretend to be passing that along through the ghost of Leonard, yeah. That was fun.

Scott Woodward: Oh my word. Oh my word.

Casey Griffiths: That’s more fun than you expect a historical conference to be.

Scott Woodward: Yeah. Wow. MHA is a party.

Casey Griffiths: MHA is a party. Everybody should join. And I want to mention, speaking of historical associations, that Vengeance is Mine has been out for over a year now, and it’s won several awards. For instance, Vengeance is Mine has won the Juanita Brooks Best Book Award in Utah History from the Utah Historical Society. It won the Smith-Pettit Best Book Award from the John Whitmer Historical Association, the Co-Founders Best Book Award from Westerners International, and a Praiseworthy Award for Best History Book, second place, from Latter-day Saints in Publishing, Media, and the Arts. So lots of accolades for this book as well, and I’ll add my own personal endorsement that the book is excellent.

Scott Woodward: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: I hope that this and the first volume are the two books that people who are really serious about learning about the massacre will approach and read first, because great research, very well told story, and you’ve done a great service by telling this story.

Rick Turley: I might add that we had dozens and dozens of helpers. Works of this depth and breadth require the work not just of a single author or two authors, but it requires entire teams of people, and we did research with our teams in 30-plus of the 50 states, plus three National Archives facilities, and gathered incredible amounts of information, which we’ve now made available to the public in various forms.

Barbara Jones Brown: That’s right. I join with Rick in giving kudos and shout-outs to the team of researchers that helped in gathering all this incredible information, so it was definitely a team effort. Rick and I just kind of carried the ball across the finish line, if you will. Took fourteen years to carry that ball across the finish line, but, yeah, we credit those who helped.

Scott Woodward: Well, it’s a tremendous work, and I want to just kind of start us out with kind of the Q&A here. I just want to ask, what got you both interested in researching this topic? It’s a big, sprawling topic. There’s so much to dig into. Like, why did you decide to take on a project of this magnitude?

Rick Turley: In January 1986 I became the managing director of what was then called the Church Historical Department, and in the 1980s we were part of a consortium of people who were working on developing monuments at the Mountain Meadows. During that decade we had descendants of the victims of the massacre who visited the site and met descendants of the perpetrators of the massacre, and they got together and eventually formed a group and then two groups and then three groups that all were interested in the history of the massacre, and that consortium eventually worked towards creating a monument on what’s called Dan Sill Hill at the Mountain Meadows. It’s a monument that was deliberately modeled after the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D. C. It’s a monument of flat stones against a hill that have the names of the victims as best they could be determined by the committee at that time, and then as we continued working on this we eventually developed a monument for the floor of the valley near where the victims had their five days of siege, and that was completed and dedicated in 1999, and then additional monuments have been added since that time. So in the middle of all of that, I became deeply interested in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I don’t even remember when I first learned about the massacre, but it was when I was quite young, relatively speaking: late teens, early twenties. And in 1992, when the Encyclopedia of Mormonism was published, I coauthored an article with Ronald K. Esplin on the massacre in there, so I’ve been writing about the massacre now for more than thirty years.

Scott Woodward: Wow.

Rick Turley: So around 2000, something like that, I decided that we ought to have a book written about the massacre by people who were employed by the church and could open up everything with complete honesty and gather all the sources that hadn’t been made available in the past and make them available, so I invited two colleagues, first Glen M. Leonard, who was the director of the Church History Museum at the time, reported to me and had been our point person in interacting with the various groups at the Mountain Meadows, and Ron Walker, who was a professor of history at BYU, to join me in that effort. That gave us Massacre at Mountain Meadows.

Casey Griffiths: And so, Rick, is it fair to say that you instigated the project, or did the church approach you and ask you to do it, or what was the attitude of the church towards it?

Rick Turley: So I came up with the idea, and, frankly, a reason for that is when I came aboard the Church History Department as managing director, I sensed this fear that people had about church history, a fear I didn’t think they should have. I mean, history is history. What happened happened. We can’t change the past, and for most of those things a long time ago, all those things a long time ago, we had nothing to do with it, so we should just be able to sit back and objectively study those events, and some of them are good. Most of them are good. In fact, you know, in my sweep of church history, they’re overwhelmingly good, but there are some things that happened that we ought to be forthright about acknowledging, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre was the worst of those, and my feeling was if we put this stake in at the very worst end of things that had happened in the history of the church, then we should be able to talk about anything. That was the motive, the rationale. Let’s be open and honest about all of the things of our past.

Scott Woodward: Love that.

Casey Griffiths: Quite understandably, in the past, historians like Juanita Brooks faced a little opposition when it came to writing about Mountain Meadows because it is such a dark subject. Was there any pushback when you presented this idea? You’re working in the Church History Department. Were there any concerns about it?

Rick Turley: So I had a rule that I constantly talk to my staff about, and that is no surprises. Whatever we do, we want to make certain that we have full disclosure upline. So we approached the senior church leaders, and they had a meeting of those senior church leaders, and I could—if I had more time, I’d go into it in detail, but the bottom line is I proposed the book, and they discussed it in that setting of the most senior church leaders, and they agreed: Let’s be open and honest about this subject that happened a long time ago. There’s something that we’ve often said in the past, and that is no one alive today is responsible for the massacre, but we’re all responsible for how we deal with it. And our feeling was on our watch, we’re going to be completely open and honest about it.

Scott Woodward: That same spirit seems to breathe through all of the Gospel Topics essays. It almost seems like—I don’t know if this was the impetus for that, but that feeling, that sense of, we need to just be open and honest and own our history and see what we can learn from it, I think has been very helpful as the last decade-plus, I think, show us that the Gospel Topics essays are trying to follow that same spirit of what you instigated with that book, so this is a great moment in our history with our church leaders and the church historical department being absolutely transparent about these very difficult subjects.

Rick Turley: And Massacre at Mountain Meadows is what brought Barbara onto the scene. Barbara, do you want to talk about that?

Barbara Jones Brown: Sure. So in 2005, I received a call from Rick Turley saying that he wanted me to come in and interview for a full-time editing position in the Church History Department. I had worked for the church for twelve years—for almost ten years, actually—before that time, as an editor in five different departments. I’ve been editor of the historical articles for the Ensign magazine most recently, and I was also the news editor, and so as a news editor, I was constantly writing about news of the church, and which led me to frequently be interviewing Rick Turley, because he and his department were constantly doing incredible things, so I met Rick through those means, and so I had turned in my resume to Elder Marlin K. Jensen, who was a church historian, and I had worked under Elder Jensen before as well. Rick called me. There was an opening, and he said, I want you to come in and interview for this position. It wasn’t a convenient time for me and my family at that time, but as soon as I heard—I said, what would I be doing? He said, I want you to edit our book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I said, oh, I’ll be right in. I was—I had always wanted to learn about the subject for decades before that, and so to have the opportunity to come in and work on this book with the three authors was a real privilege, and it actually led to me becoming a historian myself because while working on the book, I just loved digging into the historical sources, and I decided I didn’t want to just edit historians: I wanted to be a historian. So I went back to graduate school and earned a master’s degree in American history from the University of Utah, and then after that, Rick and I became coauthors on Vengeance is Mine.

Scott Woodward: Wow.

Casey Griffiths: We should mention that as groundbreaking as these books are, they are building on the foundation of other historians. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about Juanita Brooks and Will Bagley and how others had approached the subject of Mountain Meadows before this project that you brought to culmination actually started.

Barbara Jones Brown: Sure. Maybe we could start with Juanita Brooks. She is a hero of mine. She’s someone I look to as I was working hard on this book. As a mother—a stepmother of children and a mother of my own children, it was very hard, and Juanita Brooks was doing the same thing. As a stepmother and a mother of her own children, she was writing her book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. So I admired her diligence and her courage in telling this story. She came at it from a different reasons and approach than Rick and I did. She was from Southwest Utah, and in fact, our book, Vengeance is Mine, closes—a closing scene is an episode in which the young Juanita Brooks, I believe she’s still 19 at the time—she encounters and learns that her stake patriarch, named Nephi Johnson, had been a perpetrator, had been at the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and she’s shocked to learn that while he’s on his deathbed, and through that and a series of other events, she decides that she’s going to have the courage to blow open this grim, hidden secret of her community’s past and do all the work she can to tell the first scholarly telling, the first well-researched academic telling, of her community’s own secret. She did meet with a lot of opposition. She was looked down upon by members of her community. She writes that the church didn’t oppose what she did, but they also didn’t necessarily support what she did. She tried to get access to some primary sources that were in the Church History Archives, and she was denied access to those. To just show how much things have changed since then, that was in the 1940s she was writing this book: Rick and I received—and Ron Walker and Glen Leonard—we received access to everything that she had been denied access to there in the church archives, and so I think it just shows the changing of times and how it’s—like you were mentioning, Scott, it’s a different time where people are just willing to address these things in our past and not be afraid of history. So that was her approach. She did have access to a lot of primary sources, but not nearly as many as we had access to, and then, again, through our help with a team of researchers scouring the country for research, so we were able to fill in so much more than what Juanita never had access to.

Casey Griffiths: And you kind of open the book with this classic quote from Juanita Brooks, where she says, “Nothing but the truth can be good enough for the church to which I belong”—

Barbara Jones Brown: Yes.

Casey Griffiths: —which is so powerful. 

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah, we feel the same way. 

Casey Griffiths: You imagine in the 1950s, church leaders probably understandably being apprehensive about talking about something like this, but Juanita Brooks saying, no, you know, it—just like Rick said, history happened, and it’s the truth, and we should be willing to deal with it, even if it’s really difficult, and this is really difficult.

Barbara Jones Brown: Did you want to talk about other historians, Rick?

Rick Turley: Sure. So I mentioned this work that began in the 1980s of descendants of victims and descendants of perpetrators coming together and forming various groups. That led to what I’ve sometimes referred to as a flowering or a renaissance of Mountain Meadows studies. People began to tackle the topic again. Juanita Brooks’ work had been considered the seminal work in the field up to that point, so a number of people began writing books and articles about it. We don’t have time to go over all those, but I think the most substantial book that came out of that period was Will Bagley’s Blood of the Prophets. Will is a Western historian, a friend of Barbara and mine. All of us belong to a group that was called Utah Westerners. Will passed away recently, sadly had some health issues. That was probably the most substantial book that grew out of that time period, and our book, this series of two books, as I said, began also growing out of this same time period with a desire to be just completely open and honest. Barbara mentioned that we got access to materials that had been denied Juanita Brooks. Not only did we get access to those and use them, but Ron Walker and I took all of those items, created digital images of them, and then in a publication jointly published by the University of Utah Press and Brigham Young University Press, we published all of these items that Juanita Brooks had been denied, every single scrap of paper with anything on it, so you don’t have to take our word for it: You can look at the digital images and the transcriptions and our commentary associated with that. We made it available to everybody.

Casey Griffiths: And we should mention: that is the third book that if you really want to explore this subject, you should look at: It’s a book that actually has, you know, on a page, here’s this scan so you can see the original handwriting of the notes of somebody that was interviewed on the massacre. It’s got Andrew Jensen’s collection and a few other historians, if I recall correctly, and so that might be the third book you pick up if you really want to explore this subject.

Rick Turley: And I might mention three other works that people who are deeply interested in the subject could access.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Rick Turley: We published—myself, Janice Johnson and LaJean Purcell Carruth, who is our renowned shorthand transcriber—we published a two-volume set of documents through the University of Oklahoma Press that represent all of the legal documents for the nine people indicted for their roles in the massacre, except for the John D. Lee twin trials in 1875 and 1876, and those represent the third item that I want to refer people to, and that is the website mountainmeadowsmassacre.org includes full transcriptions, thousands of pages in parallel columns, showing the transcription of the original shorthand and the two transcriptions that later historians relied upon that have—that were not entirely accurate.

Scott Woodward: Oh, wow.

Rick Turley: That was one of the things—you know, people ask, why does it take fourteen years to complete a book? Well, one reason it takes that long is not all the sources that seem solid are solid. Historians for a very, very long time relied on two transcriptions of the trials. It turns out they omit things. Items have been changed. We went back and found the extant shorthand for the trials, and we had LaJean transcribe those. Then we put them in parallel columns online so everybody could access them.

Casey Griffiths: LaJean is one of, what, three people, I think, that can translate Pitman shorthand or something like that?

Rick Turley: She’s phenomenal.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown: I think it’s two. I’m not sure, but I think it’s her and her daughter. I could be wrong, but yeah, it’s . . .

Rick Turley: I’m sure there may be other people around the world, because Pitman shorthand was a very popular form for a long time, but hasn’t been used for generations, and so it’s hard to find somebody, and LaJean is one of those brilliant souls who can do it and has been working to teach others.

Casey Griffiths: And she’s in demand. I understand she’s working on the Brigham Young papers, too, because all of his discourses were in Pitman shorthand, and there’s already been some interesting discoveries there that what we read in the Journal of Discourses and other subjects aren’t always accurate transcriptions, at least based on what the original transcriptions say.

Rick Turley: That’s correct.

Barbara Jones Brown: And she also just had a book come out herself. She just published a book coauthored with Paul Reeve and Christopher Rich called This Abominable Slavery: The Battle Over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah, and that’s based on some documents that she transcribed from the Utah legislature’s debates over whether to make Utah Territory a slave territory or not, so, yeah, she’s just done incredible work.

Casey Griffiths: So this is maybe just one of several reasons why your books are so important. You’re dealing with sources that people haven’t had access to prior to that, and I think in the conversations I’ve had with both of you, there were some sources that were sort of dubious, some aspects of the massacre and its lead up that maybe people misunderstood or have been misdirected by for a long time. Can you dive into some of those a little bit?

Barbara Jones Brown: Sure. Maybe Rick could take some, and I’ll take one, and the major one for me is called Mormonism Unveiled, which has been attributed to John D. Lee as the author, but—in fact we even cite Mormonism Unveiled a little bit in our first book, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, but when we were looking at the aftermath, we found correspondence between John D. Lee’s attorney named William Bishop—he’s representing Lee. Lee is indigent towards the end of his life. Lee does not have enough money to pay him, and so William Bishop convinces Lee. He says, well, if you’ll share your life story with me, your autobiography with me, I will publish it, and he knows that Lee’s convicted and going to be executed, so he says, I will take it, and I will publish it, and then from the proceeds from that book, I will then recoup my costs, and we found letters—this kind of stunned me, but letters that—as Lee is approaching his execution date, he sends to Bishop what he’s completed of his autobiography, and he’s only written up through 1848.

Scott Woodward: Oh.

Barbara Jones Brown: And William Bishop is very upset with Lee, and he says, look, I can’t—I’m really interested in the Utah period, particularly all about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and Lee doesn’t finish that, and so William Bishop—and, again, in these letters, he says, if you’ll share your journals with me, then I can take those journals and kind of massage this and make it into a story, and I won’t go into more detail than that, but basically that just adds proof that John D. Lee did not write Mormonism Unveiled. And so William Bishop took it, used trial transcripts and a shorter confession that Lee writes, and he expands it, and essentially, William Bishop wrote this book, attributes it to John D. Lee, so he can, you know, sell a lot of copies, and he goes through nineteen printings, so we know it sold fairly well. We don’t know how much money he actually made, but once that became clear to us, we thought we can’t quote Mormonism Unveiled anymore as coming from John D. Lee, and so that’s something we just want to give a heads up to all historians and readers: that Mormonism Unveiled cannot be a source that can be quotable and attributed to John D. Lee.

Casey Griffiths: It gets quoted a lot. Like, I was reading a paper on the Danites last week, and Mormonism Unveiled had huge, like, block quotes taken from it describing Danite adventures in Missouri, and that’s going back to, you know, the 1830s.

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah.

Casey Griffiths: And Joseph Smith—you’re saying steer clear of Mormonism Unveiled.

Barbara Jones Brown: And we go into detail about it in the book. So people, again, as Rick was saying earlier, you don’t have to take our word for it. Just look at the primary sources that show there’s no way that John D. Lee could have written that book, in William Bishop’s own words, in his letters. So that book was written by William Bishop.

Rick Turley: Intriguingly, Bishop, in Lee’s voice, though speaking as John D. Lee in Mormonism Unveiled, claims that Brigham Young gathered up all of John D. Lee’s journals, and that appears to have been an assertion on Bishop’s part to hide what really happened. Bishop asked John D. Lee for his journals and, in fact, got them from the family. Years later, Bishop and the sheriff that worked with him, their families, their descendants, donated various journals to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, so that’s further evidence that they had them and that Brigham Young did not destroy them the way Lee’s voice, actually William Bishop, in Mormonism Unveiled claims that he did.

Scott Woodward: Interesting. What do you think were William Bishop’s motives? Was it just completely . . . ?

Barbara Jones Brown: Money.

Scott Woodward: Just money.

Barbara Jones Brown: Make money. Well, to make money, so he wanted to make it very sensational, make it, like, a tell-all, you know, and he does. He makes it very sensationalized, and then also, by the time John D. Lee is convicted in the second trial, Brigham Young and other church leaders had worked with the prosecuting attorney named Sumner Howard to help bring witnesses to trial to testify against Lee, which leads to Lee’s conviction. So Bishop is kind of blindsided by that. He’s not expecting that to happen, and so by the time Lee is convicted and Bishop loses that case, he is furious with Brigham Young and really hates him. I mean, you read his writings: he can’t stand Brigham Young. So I think some of it was revenge and then also to make back the money, which he states in his letters to Lee. That’s how he’s going to make the money for defending Lee. Speaking of LaJean Carruth, Rick was going to maybe talk about the trial transcripts as well.

Rick Turley: Yeah, so these trial transcripts that I mentioned are very important. When I first began working on the Mountain Meadows Massacre decades ago, the general assumption among historians was that the trial transcripts are solid. I mean, what could be more solid than legal documents, right? Well, LaJean was very helpful, along with some of our other workers, in finding out that the transcripts were not verbatim transcripts of everything that happened at the trial. So there were two transcripts that were typically used by historians: One of those transcripts was commissioned by the judge in the case who wanted to write a book. He could not find the official court reporter at that point, so he got the court reporter’s student to make the transcription. The court reporter’s student couldn’t read all of the shorthand, so he, in turn, went to the man who had been the church reporter for these purposes, and he had created a separate transcript in which he had deleted substantial portions of what had happened and changed a lot of what happened. So LaJean’s done a very complicated source chart on all of this to show what happened, but basically neither one of the transcripts was reliable.

Scott Woodward: Oh, wow.

Rick Turley: So that, then, required us to go back to the church’s archives and to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, get the extant shorthand, and have that all transcribed by LaJean, and we did take all of that and put it online, as I mentioned. Now anybody who wants to do research on this can look back at the original shorthand. They don’t have to look at these transcriptions that have been used by historians for generations: They can look at the more accurate shorthand transcriptions that LaJean did.

Scott Woodward: Wow.

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah, and those are available to the public, as Rick just said, at mountainmeadowsmassacre.org, and then you just click on a tab that says transcripts, trial transcripts, and anyone who wants can see all of those transcriptions that LaJean did. I mean, and it’s hundreds of pages. It’s remarkable.

Rick Turley: And I might mention that there are numerous other sources that have been relied upon in the past without, I think, adequate scrutiny. So there was a source that was often referred to as the journal of one of John D. Lee’s wives, and people quoted from it using a typescript. We traced that typescript down to the original volume, which was, again, at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and when we had a staff person go down there and look at the original compared to the typescript, there are important distinctions. So, for example, some people looked at the journal, which has an account of John D. Lee leaving on September 6th, 1857 with a group of people headed out on an expedition. The way that it’s written in the typescript, it makes it sound like John D. Lee is headed towards Washington, Utah, heading south and not southwest towards the Mountain Meadows. So some people have used that to defend John D. Lee and say, no, no, no, he went the opposite—he went a different direction. He was not involved in the massacre. Our researcher who went down there found that later on, there’s a portion of the same journal that says John D. Lee returned from a journey southwest, and if you look at the original entry, somebody had taken a sharp implement, and they had cut out a line at the bottom of the page, so instead of saying southwest, which is probably what it originally said, they cut it off after the “south.” So a lot of documents have been doctored, and you have to be—you have to have the will and the resources to go back to original sources, and they’re scattered all over the country, if you really want to know what happened, and that’s what we were able to do with our team of people.

Scott Woodward: Wow.

Casey Griffiths: And one of the things that you’ve mentioned is that there’s these sources that have been doctored in a way that make the church look bad, and there’s some that have been doctored in a way that maybe provide justifications for the massacre. For instance, it’s long been massacre lore that the Fancher–Baker Party were poisoning water sources or that they were getting into conflicts with Native Americans on the way down South. Can you talk a little bit about that side of things? Like, the stories that seem to sort of justify the massacre, and are they reliable, or are they pretty dubious, too, or where should we land on those?

Rick Turley: Let me just talk about one of those stories, and then Barbara can talk about others. One of the accusations that had been made from 1857 on was that the members of the party that was massacred had poisoned springs and cattle along the route, particularly in the area around Fillmore. And so we looked at that accusation and thought, how can we scientifically test this? So we looked at various trail journals for this time period in the year before and after, and we collected a series of cases, medical cases, if you will, and I assembled a panel of epidemiologists. These are doctors who are expert in epidemics. We presented the cases to them, and they evaluated all of the cases, and they came back, and they said, without tissue samples, it’s impossible to tell for certain, but we believe that what you’re looking at here is naturally occurring anthrax, which would have been tracked along the trail by all the cattle companies that came through. Well, Barbara and I had been down to the Fillmore Cemetery. We had seen the grave for a young man who supposedly died from this poisoning. We looked at that grave, and we thought, here’s a tissue sample right here.

Scott Woodward: Oh my.

Rick Turley: So we decided that we would—you know, you often say that historians know where the bodies are buried. We literally did in this case, and so we had to do two things to dig up the body: number one, we had to get legal permission. We had a friend who actually had that interesting expertise, Eric Olson. He had helped exhume some bodies in Mexico of an apostle who died down there and brought them up to Utah, so we asked him to do the legal work, which he did, and then we had to get permission. This boy’s name who had died was Proctor Robison. So we got thinking about the name Robison, Robison, and I thought, oh, Clarence Robison, the old BYU track coach, was really sort of the senior person in that family, but he had recently passed away, so I called his widow, Monita Turley Robison, my cousin, and got permission from the family, and then we decided we don’t want to have any church involvement in the analysis of the tissue, so we got a separate organization in Arizona that did this type of research for testing for anthrax, and we had the body dug up and tested. We weren’t able to confirm from what was residual in the soil because it had been too long, but all of the symptoms suggest that we’re talking about naturally occurring anthrax here and that there was no poisoning.

Scott Woodward: Wow.

Casey Griffiths: I’m still trying to deal with the fact that you dug up a body. That’s thorough research. Like, sometimes I’m like, I don’t want to go to the archive this week, but you guys actually exhumed a body and examined it—

Scott Woodward: That is—

Casey Griffiths: —to answer . . .

Scott Woodward: —thorough, thorough fact checking. Wow.

Rick Turley: We wanted to be absolutely thorough.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Rick Turley: Barbara, do you want to talk about other false accusations that were made?

Barbara Jones Brown: Sure. Yeah. We call them victim blaming. We call it victim blaming today, in today’s parlance, but this is where you do all kinds of things, saying horrible things about people to—as if to justify their murder, as if to say that they deserved it.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown: Most of these things came from perpetrators of the crime themselves as a way to justify their horrific actions, and I think maybe salve their own consciences. So one of them was saying that the people of the train—this came out immediately after the massacre, saying they were rotten with the pox, which meant they had venereal disease, and we showed, we quoted, we cited, forensic anthropologist Shannon Novak’s work. She had looked at the bones and could say that there was no sign of venereal disease in these folks. We didn’t think there was anyways, but we were able to cite this scientific research to rule that out. I also think it’s significant that many of the stories about people passing through and doing bad things as they’re traveling south, they came much later. There were only a couple of accounts that are contemporary in which people say that there was some tension going on between emigrants, but, again, we don’t even know which emigrant party it was, but just that there was some tension in Fall of 1857, but for the most part it was very important to us to debunk all of these falsehoods, again, that were started by perpetrators themselves and to just show these were innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they did nothing to bring on what happened to them. Even if just one person had been murdered, nothing justifies what happened to these innocent people, most of whom were children.

Scott Woodward: And were you able to validate the claim that some made after the murders, that those in the party had been saying that they were involved in the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith? How much can we believe that? And that that maybe had triggered some Latter-day Saints to feel like they needed to avenge the blood of the prophets?

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah, we did not—we found absolutely no evidence that any of the people in the train had anything to do with the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum, or that they were even in Missouri. They—to our knowledge, those that we were able to document and find were all from Arkansas. The place that that starts, that rumor starts, is with John D. Lee. We have Wilford Woodruff’s journal account. He records on September 29th, 1857, what Lee tells Brigham Young and Wilford Woodruff, who’s the church—assistant church historian at the time. He says, well, these people were—again, part of this victim blaming that we were talking about. He says that they were involved in poisoning, and then he says that they were in the mob in Missouri and Illinois, and—but there’s just absolutely no evidence to support that at all. So we know. We can—with that one, we can look exactly where the impetus of that rumor started, it was in September of 1857, as well as the poisoning rumor, which Lee also spreads as well, and other perpetrators do as well.

Scott Woodward: So what do you do when it comes to motive? I mean, you have to sort of try to come up with something. There’s this act that happened. Something triggered this group of church leaders/state militia to enact this horrendous act of violence. What have you been able to get at in the sources in terms of, like, actual motive for this group to do that?

Rick Turley: We combed the literature on the history of violence, which is extensive, to learn how mass killings like this occur.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Rick Turley: And generally there’s a similar sequence that occurs in mass killings, which sadly happen all over the world through time. We wish we could say this was the only instance of it, but it’s not. It happened repeatedly in the United States. I think one of the things we need to remind people of is that, in addition to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which a lot of people have devoted attention to, when we talk to a lot of our Native friends about that, they say, why isn’t more attention being given to, say, the Sand Creek Massacre or the Bear River Massacre, and their point is well taken. And there are massacres of native peoples in the state of Utah as well that haven’t received a lot of attention. The Circleville Massacre is one of those examples. If you look at the history of mass killings through time, you see that certain similarities exist. One of those is that the environment at the time is unsettled. This was a period of the Utah War. The people in Southwestern Utah were aware that the U. S. Army was marching towards Utah. They had heard a rumor that a portion of the army had broken off from the main column and was headed southwest. In fact, that was true. They didn’t know that they had been sent on another mission, but they thought that perhaps from their intelligence, they were going to emerge from the canyons just north and east of Cedar City, and they might attack them. So the people are unsettled, they’re uncertain about their future. That’s one of the things that happens. Then, under those conditions, people tend to make poor judgments because they’re edgy. So in this particular case, they make a decision to attack the train. Now this attack on the train, Barbara and I believe, is probably like similar attacks that were ordered by Brigham Young on cattle companies. He did not want blood to be shed, but he wanted the federal government to feel like people in Utah were essential to the future of the United States and their desire to continue with settlement and so forth, so Brigham Young, working through translators, worked to have a number of cattle companies raided along the way. Barbara and I have put a map in the book. It’s on the back inside cover, and it has little sort of stars or explosions that show each point along the trail north and the trail south where these cattle raids occurred. These raids, as one of the people who was raided wrote, were not intended for the purpose of shedding any blood. Brigham Young knew that if they shed blood, that that would just give additional impetus for an army that was already down on them to do even worse things towards them. So what he wanted to do is run off cattle and essentially say to Washington, you need us because if you don’t have us, people can’t travel safely along the trail. Barbara and I think that the Mountain Meadows Massacre was initially intended to be one of those, but it went terribly wrong. There was decisions made at the local level that made it go terribly wrong and become murderous, and then once they shed blood, once they shed blood, they felt that if they let the company go on to California, especially after the company learned that there were white men—see, this—these raids were set up to look like cattle raids, which is one of the other aspects of the—

Barbara Jones Brown: By Native Americans only, yeah.

Rick Turley: And, in fact, they’ve—the company found out through a series of events we probably don’t have time to talk about here but are in the book, that white people were involved, local white settlers. And so they decided locally that, if we let this company go on to Southern California while we already are in danger of an army emerging from the mountains in the East, they will raise an army from the West, we’ll be pinched in between, and they made the very horrible judgment that it’s either our families or their families, and they therefore decided to massacre them. Now, in better times, they should have thought. They should have thought that if they massacred an entire company and that company did not show up at its expected destination in California, that people would know something terrible had happened, and they should have thought that Paiutes did not have a reputation for killing large groups of people like this, and that immediately it would be suspected that it was whites who did the killing. In this type of complex situation where they were feeling the pressures of the time, they didn’t do that, and that’s very common with mass killings. 

Casey Griffiths: And I should note, I visited the massacre site with both of you back in September at the John Whitmer conference, and I had not heard that narrative before, that maybe it wasn’t a premeditated massacre: It was a cattle raid that went wrong, and then everything spiraled into this bloody cover up where over a hundred men, women, and children are killed. I don’t know if that makes them look better or worse, but that is one possibility, correct?

Barbara Jones Brown: Either way, like, there’s no making this look any better, no matter what the reason behind, you know, killing innocent men, women, and children, but one reason why this interpretation came out is because in Vengeance is Mine, we dedicate a whole volume just to the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, so we’ve been able to dig deeper than anyone ever has before, and so the thing that, like, surprised me as I was working on volume two was there was another raid of a different cattle company on approximately October 3rd, 1857, including some of the same people who had participated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and they raid this other company, run off their cattle, don’t kill anyone, and then again, looking at this massive amount of information that was gathered, then we found that there was another raid that almost happened, and then some raids that did happen all between September 7th and October 3rd, 1857. So when you see all of these raids on cattle companies, in only one case was—a different emigrant was killed in a different company up in northern Utah near the Utah-Idaho border, but you look at all these raids happening at the same time with the same circumstances, then you’re like, something else is going on here, and that’s where, again, just we dug deeper and deeper and realized that there was this policy of encouraging cattle raiding, as Rick described, as part of the Utah War, as part of the Saints’ effort to try to convince the federal government, pull the troops back, or this kind of thing is going to happen.

Rick Turley: Well, this is an—this is the analog or the complementary story to the one we frequently hear told in Utah history about Lot Smith and his raiders from the Nauvoo Legion going up and attacking the supply trains for the U. S. Army. These are civilian supply trains that were supporting the U. S. Army. Those raids are typically celebrated in Utah history books, and so the raids that were occurring along the trail of cattle companies were quite similar to those.

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah, it’s all part of that same strategy to end the Utah War and prevent federal troops from occupying Utah territory.

Casey Griffiths: So all of this has to be understood in the context of the Utah War and the approaching army. If I can just ask—you know, the big question for Latter-day Saints surrounding Mountain Meadows, and it seems like the most common misunderstanding, is Brigham Young’s involvement in Mountain Meadows. Can you quickly summarize Brigham Young’s responsibility for the massacre? What does he bear responsibility for, and what is maybe unfairly put on him in relation to what happened at Mountain Meadows?

Barbara Jones Brown: We didn’t find any evidence—just like our predecessor Juanita Brooks, we did not find any evidence that Brigham Young ordered the massacre. In fact, we found quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, showing that he did not order the massacre itself. We do agree also with Juanita Brooks’s interpretation that during this time of war, there was a lot of strong rhetoric, some violent rhetoric at times, that was coming from Brigham Young and other church leaders, and it certainly led to an environment in which people were—that environment Rick was describing, where people were kind of fearing what was going to happen, and in such a case, in an environment like that, it led to their choosing to participate in violence rather than maybe in other times they wouldn’t have done so. So the violent rhetoric contributed, and, again, with this policy, though he repeatedly said he didn’t want a drop of blood shed in Utah, ultimately, when things went awry, and then local leaders made this decision, oh, well, we need to wipe out these witnesses in order to protect ourselves, it ultimately did start with a war strategy, but, again, it was this time of war, it was a strategy, but did he intend to wipe out innocent people and order that? No. And we’re just glossing the surface here, but if you want to dig deep into this, we encourage you to read Vengeance is Mine, and you can see for yourself all of the documentation we have that supports this conclusion.

Casey Griffiths: Local leaders are the ones primarily responsible. A question that was asked when we were on the tour I’d love for you to answer right now is how come John D. Lee is the only person who seems to face justice for this? Was he singled out? Was he a scapegoat? Or what’s the reason why John D. Lee was the person who became most associated with the massacre?

Rick Turley: Oh, in Massacre at Mountain Meadows we have an appendix in which we list all of the men who we believe had some responsibility for carrying out the massacre, and I don’t remember the exact number, but we accumulate between fifty and sixty people who have some type of role in that. Early on, when the federal officials began to investigate this case, they decided that they were going to go after leaders, primarily. They wanted leaders for a couple of reasons, one of which was that they felt that they bore the most responsibility, and second, these leaders were also local church leaders. They were antagonistic towards the church, and they felt that if they could bring in stake presidents, which both Isaac Haight and William Dame were, that that sort of ties them—and in those days, you know, there weren’t as many stake presidents as there are today. Being a stake president was a pretty lofty position and tied quite closely to the senior leaders above them, so the feeling was that they could somehow or another indict those people, then it gets it close to Brigham Young and George A. Smith, and for political reasons that we explain in Vengeance is Mine, a sort of tug-of-war for power in the territory, they really wanted to knock down Brigham Young and George A. Smith and get Latter-day Saints disenfranchised. When they have the federal grand jury in 1874 that indicts, that grand jury is made up of Latter-day Saints and other people, a mixed jury, and they indict nine people for their roles in the massacre, and most of those are the leaders. So you have William Dame, who is the senior military leader in southern Utah and gives the final order, if you will. He later waffles on whether it was an order or not, but he sort of is the senior military official involved. You have Isaac Haight is kind of the linchpin for the whole thing in Cedar City, the stake president and mayor there, and the local militia major. You have John D. Lee, who played a role and who talked about it a lot and therefore sort of became the national poster child for it. You have Philip Klingensmith, who was the bishop in Cedar City, and he was indicted as well, and you have several others. So they indict these nine people, and they go after them. They end up arresting five of the nine. Four end up on the lam and are never captured. Of the five they’ve arrested, the biggest fish in the net, their dragnet, is William Dame, and so he’s the one they want to go after. Let’s go after William Dame. But they did not have the evidence they needed to convict them, so they did what prosecutors have done for ages, and that is, if you’re doing—if you’re trying to break up a conspiracy and you get a bunch of fish in your dragnet, you go to the small fish and get them to cop on the big fish. So they went to John D. Lee, who was a small fish, and they said to him, look, you write a confession, and we’ll drop one of the two counts against you. If the confession is satisfactory, we’ll drop the second count, and you get to walk. So John D. Lee checked with his attorneys, they said, you know, there’s a lot of evidence against you, this is probably the best deal you’re going to get. So he accepts the plea deal, he sits down and writes a weak confession, they get it back, declare it’s not satisfactory, and now because they don’t have the goods on William Dame, they decide they are going to go against the man they do have the goods on, and that is John D. Lee. So that’s how he ends up on the point of the spear.

Casey Griffiths: I think you mentioned when we were at Mountain Meadows, John D. Lee had a big mouth, too, like he—he goes back to New Harmony and pretty much declares that it happened shortly after the event actually happened, so he was kind of his own worst enemy when it came to this.

Barbara Jones Brown: And like what Rick pointed out, he was caught as well, you know? Others also either turn themselves in or were caught, or in the case of Philip Klingensmith, he turned state’s evidence early on, and so Lee was caught. We have a dramatic chapter about Lee’s arrest, so he’s caught, and then he did murder people. There were witnesses that came down in Lee’s second trial who testified seeing him kill people at the Mountain Meadows. And so was he a scapegoat? It depends on how you define scapegoat. Should more people besides John D. Lee have received justice? Absolutely. Many more people. Ultimately, it is just him. But was he innocent? Was he an innocent scapegoat? Absolutely not. He did participate in the conspiracy and then the actual murder of people at Mountain Meadows. One thing, another myth that our book debunks, was that after Lee’s convicted, that the prosecution just decides, okay, we’re done. We got our one token guy. We’re not going to prosecute this anymore. But, in fact—this was a big surprise for me—the sources showed that Sumner Howard, who again was the prosecuting attorney in Lee’s second trial, he is trying to get other convictions, and he’s trying to get other perpetrators arrested and trying to get evidence on others, and he’s just never able to. He’s never able to get the funding from the federal government sufficient to support posses going out and searching and hunting down these perpetrators that are living on the lam, but he does for a time try to bring other perpetrators to justice. So it wasn’t just Lee was the token person. It just unfortunately worked out that way that only one person was convicted.

Rick Turley: And Judge Jacob Boreman, the judge in the trials, also was trying to do what he could to help bring people to justice.

Scott Woodward: So help us understand why it took so long. The massacre occurs on September 11th, 1857, and we don’t get even our first indictments until, what, July of 1875?

Rick Turley: September 1874.

Scott Woodward: September of ’74. Okay. I know there’s a civil war in there, but that only goes till ’65, doesn’t it? And then part of my question is, is there more you think the church could have done in the first four years before the civil war breaks out to facilitate a legal resolution, or was there just such a tension between them and the government that they didn’t want to facilitate and pursue that, or—I guess it’s a jumble of questions, but why does it take so long?

Rick Turley: It’s an excellent question and one that needs to be asked. Probably the question Barbara and I have had most from people is, basically, what did Brigham Young know, and when did he know it? So our book carefully goes through and lays all of it out. To make a long story short, John D. Lee reports to Brigham Young on September 29, 1857. He lies about what happened. Brigham Young sends three apostles south to do their own sort of investigation of what happens. Their handlers turn out to be Mountain Meadows Massacre participants, and so they walk them through a scenario that reinforces what John D. Lee had to say. However, by 1859, Brigham Young has severe doubts about what happened, and that’s in part because the federal government is coming up with additional information and saying things and—because Brigham Young is beginning to doubt John D. Lee and others, so in 1859, Brigham Young talks to the federal district attorney for the territory of Utah and says to him, we need to try this case, and I will guarantee, I will guarantee that if you hold this trial in Southern Utah where we can get the witnesses and they can come in easily without inconvenience, that everybody that you want there in court will be in court, and we can try this thing. For political reasons that, again, we describe in the book, namely that one of the judges in this case, and another man, they want to perpetuate the so-called Mormon problem that, you know, becomes the basis for a lot of political actions against the church. They want to continue that and not resolve the Mountain Meadows Massacre immediately, because it was too good of a case to keep these things in front of the public eye. If you read the book, you’ll see some interesting political things that occur. Then you get the—of course, you get the Civil War. By this time, of course, Brigham Young does not have any responsibility as a civil official, but he constantly says, I will cooperate if you want my help in getting this, and nobody asked for his help until the second John D. Lee trial, when there’s a new prosecutor who doesn’t have a dog in the political fight. He comes in, accepts Brigham Young’s offer to help out. Brigham Young helps out, and John D. Lee’s convicted, and they agree from the beginning that John D. Lee’s just the beginning, but during the trials, as you’ll see when you read the book, a variety of things happen, and one of those things is that everybody becomes antagonistic towards Brigham Young and the church, and so they sort of back away at that point. George A. Smith dies, Brigham Young dies, and after they die, the political reasons for prosecuting this case disappear with them or largely decrease, and so they go with the other topic that they think they can get public attention on nationally, and that is plural marriage, and plural marriage is the vehicle that they use to gain political control over Utah. 

Barbara Jones Brown: Just adding a little bit on what Rick just said, so the Mountain Meadows Massacre is seen as a political weapon by non-Mormons who are living in Utah who want to break the LDS stronghold over politics in Utah, and they think that the only way that they can do that is by disenfranchising Mormons. So if Latter-day Saints can’t vote, and they can’t serve on juries and so forth, they can’t hold public office, then all of the non-Mormons who live in Utah, they can run for office and win. So they start out trying to use Mountain Meadows to win that. In that case they lose. The federal government says, no, we’re not going to take away—disenfranchise Mormons because of the Mountain Meadows Massacre not getting tried yet. So then they say, okay, well, let’s turn to polygamy. Let’s use polygamy as that reason. And so this ties into suffrage, right? So in the 1880s, all the anti-polygamy legislation heats up instead of Mountain Meadows Massacre prosecution. Utah women who’ve been voting since 1870, they lose their voting rights. Anyone who is a polygamist and who will not disavow polygamy, they lose their voting rights, and guess what happens? These non-Mormon residents of Utah who’ve been wanting to control, take over politics, take over political control of Utah, they are swept into office. They all win, and they see themselves as breaking that political stronghold in Utah. And one of those who wins, who takes office, is a man named Robert Baskin, who was a prosecutor in Lee, John D. Lee’s first trial, who was originally trying to use Mountain Meadows as this political weapon. But anyways, he eventually becomes mayor of Salt Lake City and becomes very popular because he brings infrastructure, including clean water, and so in the end he ends up on much friendlier terms with the Latter-day Saints in Utah. So it’s a fascinating story, and we go through all of this in Vengeance is Mine. 

Casey Griffiths: Well, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about reconciliation, then. So I know that both of you have worked with the descendants of the survivors of the massacre—there’s seventeen children that survived the massacre—and that you’ve had some really, really touching experiences. I was wondering if maybe you could walk us through some of those experiences you’ve had with descendants from the victims.

Barbara Jones Brown: Wow. I mean, Rick and I and others have had countless amazing experiences up until—they just continue. I’ve been teaching an online course with the University of Utah on Mountain Meadows, and I had some friends, three friends, who are descendants of victims join me for the last day of class—it’s all on Zoom—and just answering questions and sharing their feelings. That was just last week, so it’s an ongoing thing. For me it first started when I started delving into the sources, and I was just haunted and horrified by what I was learning, and so I frequently expressed to Rick, I’d go down the hall and say, I just really want to meet descendants of victims. He says, well, the descendant of John Twitty Baker and Alexander and Eliza Fancher, they’ll be here next week. You can say hello to them then. They were visiting with Elder Jensen. They invited me out to, in April of 2007, a reenactment of the leaving of the wagon train from Bellerspring, Arkansas in April 2007. All of the descendants were invited to that, so I flew out there and started making friends. Then some of those folks we made friends with would come out and visit us in Utah. It just went back and forth, so I think so much of it is—a lot of it is due to these books and just—you know, you have to have an understanding of a horrific event in history. You have to understand it before you can feel sorrow for it and say you’re sorry for it. If you don’t have that understanding, it’s impossible to do that, and so these books we were working on, that was going on. 150th anniversary of the massacre, that was going on. The church released, and Elder Henry B. Eyring of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles read, a statement of regret at that event. Just countless events like this and friendships that continue to go on. Casey, you mentioned that Rick and I, we led a tour group to the Mountain Meadows as part of the John Whitmer Historical Association that was in St. George this year. We had descendants of victims that happened to be in town. We asked them to join us and share their thoughts on the tour. So it’s an ongoing process, and I’m sure Rick has more to add about his personal experiences with this.

Rick Turley: It goes back to what I said in the beginning that our goal was, and our goal was to bring out the truth.

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah.

Rick Turley: Truth is an amazing healer.

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah.

Rick Turley: By facing the facts of what happened, acknowledging the wrongs that had occurred, and expressing sorrow for what happened, we’ve been able to reach common ground with these people whose ancestors had been murdered without cause in 1857, and who only want two things: they want the truth told, and we have done that, and they want the resting place of their ancestors, the Mountain Meadows, preserved and respected. So working with them to gain National Historic Landmark status for the Mountain Meadows was an important step. Barbara and I went out there, as did a representative of the state of Utah, the state Historic Preservation Officer. We had the heads of all three of the Mountain Meadows organizations and other members of those groups come out. We all stood before a committee. I gave a speech that was requested by the three heads of those organizations, and that speech was given from the vantage point of the victim, and I tried to portray what it would have been like to be a victim of the massacre, not the usual way the story is told in Utah history books.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Rick Turley: And after we gave our presentation and each one of the presidents stood up as well as other representatives and said, we agree with this, the committee voted to grant National Historic Landmark status to the Mountain Meadows Massacre Historic Site, which was to us rather miraculous because we sat in on some of the other presentations that day, and we didn’t hear another one that we participated in, another—in any meeting that we participated in, we didn’t hear any of the proposals for National Historic Landmark status get approved that day. Instead, people were turned back for further study. Now, there may have been some that we didn’t attend, but we were somewhat frightened that we might not be able to make it, but they voted in favor of that, and afterwards we had hugs all around and photographs taken. We felt like we had collectively, in a spirit of truth and reconciliation, reached an important milestone to help preserve the remains of these victims in perpetuity.

Barbara Jones Brown: One more example I’ll share is a year ago this past September, Rick and I were invited to speak in the St. George Tabernacle. Our book had just come out, and we were invited to speak right there in St. George about the Mountain Meadows Massacre in the tabernacle. There were a couple hundred people there. The tabernacle was packed. Again, it had just been after the descendants had been in town to honor their ancestors. They come into St. George generally every other year. This year they came twice, back to back, but they were in the tabernacle, a few of them, and somebody, a gentleman who had come and approached me before, he was a church missionary, and I recognized the last name of Jukes on his name tag, and he came up to me and he said, I just have a question. I need to know something, and I saw the last name of Jukes, and I said, your ancestor was there. And he said, okay. I just wanted to know the truth. But as Rick and I finished our address, and what we recommended to the audience, and we recommend it to your audience today, is if you ever meet somebody who’s a descendant of a victim, the right way to respond is just to say you’re sorry that it happened. Just express your sorrow. Of course, we’re not responsible for it today, but we express your sorrow for what happened. That’s all they want to hear.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Barbara Jones Brown: This gentleman, Elder Jukes, who was a missionary there, said, Barbara, you said that—you mentioned that there’s descendants of victims in the audience here today. Would they mind standing so we can tell them how sorry we are? And there were a few there, and they stood up, and they received a standing ovation. People in the tabernacle stood and cheered for them to show their love and support. And then, one friend, he called me later, he says, well, thanks to you, after that, for about an hour, people in the tabernacle lined up to come and hug me and tell me how sorry they were for what had happened to my ancestors, so that’s just one more example of just the beautiful and healing experiences that we’ve experienced and that can happen when people are willing to engage with the truth. Don’t be afraid of it. It happened more than 160 years ago. Don’t be afraid of that. Engage with it. It’s painful, but then just say you’re sorry, and only then can we have true healing and reconciliation, and these friends of ours, I’ve often said, as horrible as the massacre was, we were just saying this the other day, if it had never happened we wouldn’t know each other, and we are now dear, dear friends because of the massacre, and so that’s the kind of reconciliation and healing that can come.

Scott Woodward: Wow.

Rick Turley: And I might add to that, we’ve put a lot of time and effort into the Mountain Meadows Massacre Historic Site, now a National Historic Landmark. The church has taken a lot of time and effort and resources to acquire property to add to that, to make it a fitting memorial to these people whose lives were unjustly taken back in 1857. We hope that people will visit the site and that in visiting the site, they will show a proper attitude of reverence and respect. In the past some people have written on markers or otherwise defaced things. We would ask them not to do so, but instead to recognize that this is a site where they should feel a sense of reverence and awe. We hope they’ll study what we’ve written about it, so that they fully understand it when they visit it. We think that the way the property has been preserved helps you to visualize it in a way you otherwise would not be able to do, and so those two things: recognize the truth, and then respect the land and the victims who are associated with that site.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, when we visited the site back in September—I’ve been there multiple times, but to be there with a descendant of one of the victims was really powerful, and then afterwards we went back to St. George, and there was a quilt that both groups have worked together to make. Can you tell us just a little bit about that healing quilt, too, and what its origins were?

Barbara Jones Brown: Sure. There’s actually two quilts. They’re twins. One hangs in Carroll County, Arkansas, which is where many of the emigrants were from, and the other hangs in the old county courthouse in St. George, Utah. St. George didn’t exist in 1857, but it is the major city today that’s closest to the massacre today. But it was when a dear friend of mine, one of these close friends we’ve been talking about, Diane Fancher, was staying with me in her home, in one of these back and forth visits and she says, you know, our lives are like threads, and when we thread our lives together we can make beautiful quilts, and I thought about that metaphor that night, and I thought, what if we actually did make some quilts together? And so I reached out to my aunt, Anna Rolaf, who happens to be a master quilter, and shared this idea, and she talked about friendship quilts, or album quilts, which is where you have a lot of different people make their own square, and so we reached out to descendants of victims, perpetrators, church leaders, historians, just people from Arkansas, and invited participation, and so there are forty-six quilt squares on each quilt of these two twinner quilts, and each one was made by one of these folks I just described, and the quilts are titled “Mountain Meadows Massacre Remembrance and Reconciliation,” and people were free to write whatever they wanted to write on these squares. It’s a really powerful symbol of how people can come together in a spirit of healing, so I invite people to visit it when they’re in St. George or in Carroll County, Arkansas, or you can just go online and Google the quilts, and you can see pictures of them. We also—Anna hand-designed the border for these quilts and hand-stitched them, and then at all of these events we’ve been describing, we always had the quilt tops out. The quilt tops were out in Arkansas, they were out at the Mountain Meadows a few times, and everybody could go in and put in their own stitches as well, so they’re a tribute to healing and reconciliation.

Scott Woodward: Wow. 

Casey Griffiths: That’s really beautiful, yeah.

Scott Woodward: So great. Well, this has been just a tremendous time together. We really, really appreciate you coming on the show today, and I thought maybe we could end with this question, and I think you’ve already gone a long ways to answering it. Rick, you mentioned at the beginning of our discussion today that the history just happened. The truth is just truth. In other occasions, I’ve heard of you saying that it’s just time for us to own our history and just to learn what we can learn from it, right? And you’ve both been modeling that really well today. Is there anything else that you hope we learn from this particular history? Any other healthy ways for Latter-day Saints to own this history that you’d like to talk about before we wrap all this up?

Rick Turley: I might say this: as well as my thirty years in the Church History Department, I spent twelve years overseeing the Family History Department, went to a lot of meetings on genealogy and family history, and it is a natural human tendency to want to honor our ancestors.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Rick Turley: I want to say this to Latter-day Saints who may have ancestors who participated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre or did other things that were not honorable: Don’t try to rehabilitate your ancestors for your own personal glory. Remember, we seek to honor ancestors, but we don’t worship them. What they did is what they did. Who they were is—you know, who they were is who they were.

Scott Woodward: Yeah.

Rick Turley: So if your ancestor happens to have been a perpetrator of the massacre, don’t try to make them a non-participant. Instead, just acknowledge the truth of what happened, and when you have an opportunity to meet with a victim, express your sorrow for what happened.

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah. I can speak from personal experience to that. Years after starting to work on Vengeance is Mine, I recognized a name in my genealogy that looked familiar to me, and I looked in the index of Massacre at Mount Meadows that has—or, excuse me, one of the appendices that lists the perpetrators of the crime, and I discovered I was a direct descendant of one of the traitors named William S. Holly. That was shocking for me just to find that out at all, but then, just because I’ve been working on this, and I—the quilts had been made. I mean I had been involved in all of this for years, and so then to discover I was a descendant of a perpetrator was shocking, and so I understand folks who either they’re a direct descendant of a perpetrator or just a Latter-day Saint. I understand that it’s painful to acknowledge that people in your history could have participated in something so awful, but the way to alleviate that pain, if you will, the way to overcome that sorrow, is not to try and rehabilitate your ancestor or anyone, not to try and say, well, they were good except for this one week in their lives. You know, not try to excuse that in any way, shape, or form. You know, participating in mass murder is participating in mass murder. But rather to just, you know—again, understanding the context in which it happened, the historical context, the time of war that it was in, but not making any excuses for them. Understanding the context and making excuses are two different things. But just saying, you know, yeah, my ancestor did this, and it was horrific, and I’m sorry. And I just want to emphasize that no one alive today is responsible for it. So just because you had an ancestor or a predecessor who participated in this doesn’t say anything about you. That doesn’t mean that you’re a violent person. That doesn’t mean that you could do something as horrific. So just be willing to apologize in terms of just saying you’re sorry that it ever happened is the only true way to find healing and peace, not by trying to exonerate or excuse your ancestor.

Casey Griffiths: We believe people are punished for their own sins and not for their ancestors’ transgressions.

Barbara Jones Brown: That’s right.

Casey Griffiths: But it is helpful that you acknowledge the pain. And, again, it’s healing to say, I’m sorry for what happened. There’s no justification for this. It’s the darkest day in the history of the church, and we just need to accept that. Well, thank you very much.

Rick Turley: Grateful to you two for having us on, and, again, we want to express appreciation to the many dozens, might even have been in the end hundreds, of people who helped out in one way or another in all of these projects that we’ve talked about, this sort of collective recognition of what really happened, I think is important.

Barbara Jones Brown: Yeah, I agree. And thank you again. We’re so appreciative of also the dozens of people who have asked us to come on their podcasts or their radio programs or newspaper interviews. We’re so grateful that so many people are interested in this subject. I think it’s an indication, again, of how times have changed, where people are now willing and want to learn about it and talk about it, and, again, only by doing so can we heal and move on. So thank you for being part of that, Scott and Casey, and making that help to make that possible today.

Scott Woodward: Absolutely. What an honor to have you both. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. In our next episode, which will be the last of this series and which will be released on Christmas Eve of 2024, we sit down with our friend Patrick Mason, a Latter-day Saint historian, scholar on peace studies, and author of several books on violence and peace in Latter-day Saint history. Together we take a step back and think deeply about how each of us can more intentionally participate in bringing peace on earth and goodwill to all. If you’re enjoying or gaining value from Church History Matters, we would love it if you could pay it forward by telling your friends about it or by taking a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. That’s right: All of our content is free because people like you donate to make it possible. So if you’re in a position where you’re both willing and able to make a one-time or ongoing donation, be assured that your contribution will help us at Scripture Central to produce and disseminate more quality content to combat false and faith-eroding material out there in the digital marketplace of ideas. And while Casey and I try very hard to be historically and doctrinally accurate in what we say on this podcast, please remember that all views expressed in this and every episode are our views alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scripture Central or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.