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By Root 381 0

of the West told a different story. According to some observers—including former governors and justices of the Utah territory, and a few confessors and witnesses—Blood Atonement was indeed practiced by the Mormons, and it was applied to a wider range of sins than simple murder. Some of the offending crimes that might merit death are not hard to imagine: There were numerous rumors in the mid to late 1800s about men who had strongly offended Brigham Young, or who had violated Mormon oaths of truth and secrecy, and ended up lying along some remote roadside, or buried in nameless graves, with bullets through their heads. But there were also other offenses that might invite death. Among them, according to some writers, were adultery, incest, whoredom, rape, thievery, hopeless mental illness (which in its more dramatic forms was sometimes read as a sign of demonic possession), and flagrant and persistent disobedience of one’s parents. At midnight, the stories went, a committee of Mormon elders, dressed in black, would visit the offender at his home and would lead him or her to a freshly dug grave site. Some prayers would be offered as the condemned kneeled by the grave, and then someone—perhaps the wronged husband or father, or a righteous church leader—would lean over and cut the offender’s throat, holding him or her by the head, so that the dying person’s blood would empty onto the ground.

Did any acts of Blood Atonement ever really occur in Mormon Utah? Church historians have denied the rumors for over a century now and, indeed, there are no proven cases of Mormon authorities ever having sanctioned any acts of execution or bloodletting under the church’s auspices. But it is also true that many Danites—the Mormons’ band of secret protectors, police, and avengers—were guilty of a sizable number of shootings and murders in the Utah area, without being tried or apparently even chastised for their deeds. Obviously, given the unscrutinized and theocratic rule that the Mormons enjoyed in large parts of the Utah territory during the early years of its settlement, it is possible that executions and assassinations may have been conducted with such ironclad and sacred secrecy that history may never retrieve the truth. As Wallace Stegner wrote in Mormon Country: “[I]t would be bad history to pretend that there were no holy murders in Utah …, that there was no saving the souls of sinners by the shedding of blood …, and that there were no mysterious disappearances of apostates and offensive Gentiles.”

The legends of Blood Atonement also served both a mythic and moral purpose. On one level, the spread of these stories illustrated two harsh facts. To the extent that the stories were spread by anti-Mormons, they illustrated how America regarded the Saints as demons who had turned their religion into a system of ritualistic outrages. To the extent that the stories were perpetuated by Mormons themselves, they demonstrated how the bitterness of their history had turned them into a hard people, and how that hardness and meanness had now spilled over into the land that they were settling. In addition, the rumors about Blood Atonement helped the Mormons keep their own people in line. My mother recalled hearing terror tales about old Utah’s secret Danites and their midnight deeds for years. She also remembered that these fables were often told to children, in tones that implied that maybe the Danites and their rites of Blood Atonement weren’t altogether banished in early twentieth-century Utah.

But the Mountain Meadows Massacre was not a myth and it was not a rumor. It happened, and its horror has been well-documented, even confessed to. Briefly, here is what took place:

In September 1857, a wagon train of Arkansas emigrants, known as the Baker-Fancher party, was making its way through southern Utah, en route to California. Unfortunately, they were journeying through the region shortly after the Mormons had received word that federal troops were marching their way. The intent of these troops, Brigham Young had decided, was hostile—he had long