Clip #1: Why Did You Want to Write This Book?
Ronald W. Walker:
The massacre has left a legacy, a burden upon members of the Church, and the only way you can erase that burden, lift that burden, is to confront it with complete honesty and open disclosure, and then at that point healing can take place.
Richard E. Turley Jr.:
Mountain Meadows Massacre is arguably the worst event in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in the state of Utah. For that reason it’s been a topic that’s be very uncomfortable for many people to talk about. We felt that in order to face this topic head-on and in order to make it more comfortable for people to talk about, to promote healing, we just had to face it. We had to uncover all the facts wherever we could find them and then let the evidence tell the story for us. Only by facing this story head-on, directly, could we finally expect to get to a point where real healing could take place.
Glen M. Leonard:
I was excited about that prospect that our goal would be to find the truth and to present it with candor. For ten years off and on before I got involved in this book, I had been working with some of the descendants of the victims, the Arkansas people, in the projects that led to two monuments at the meadows. I sensed their distrust of Mormon historians because they feared we were hiding something and they wanted to know what we were hiding. One of them even asked me, “Can you face the truth if you find it? If you find Brigham Young involved, can you as a faithful Latter-day Saint indict a prophet?” That was a big question, but I felt that we would find whatever was there and that we would all be willing to accept it, and that is what I told him, and it has been a satisfying effort in that respect.
Clip #2: What sets this book apart from others that have been written on the subject?
Glen M. Leonard:
I think in recent years we have seen a very gradual process leading to what you are seeing today with the Mountain Meadows Massacre book. There has been a movement towards openness, a movement towards a willingness within the Church among historians in the Church to grapple with difficult issues and especially, as Ron said, to put things in a context to help you gain an understanding of what it means. This is not the end. Like you say, it really is an example, perhaps the best example to date, of what can be done in the future. There are still topics to address, and there is more to be said about this as well. There could be other articles and books that we could spin off because there are parts of the story that we simply could not fit into the book.
Richard E. Turley Jr.:
The materials that we gathered for writing this book about the Mountain Meadows Massacre were voluminous. We did research from New England to southern California from the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast, with a considerable amount of time spent in the lower central states of the United States that were the homes of the victims of the massacre before they came west — and also months of cumulative time spent at the National Archives. We have many dozens of linear feet of materials that have been collected for this project, all of which we hope to make available to people who are interested in the subject. Some of the most important collections we are actually going to publish separately as a volume. We will be publishing the David H. Morris collection and the Andrew Jensen collection. These are two substantial collections that have not been generally accessible to researchers on this topic in the past that contain useful and important information on the subject.
Clip #3: How much research went into writing this book?
Richard E. Turley Jr.:
Our narrative rests on the most thorough research and documentation on the Mountain Meadows Massacre that has ever been conducted in modern times.
Richard E. Turley Jr.:
When we first started this project and announced it back in 2002, we assumed we could complete the project in sufficient time to have it published by the following year. We thought we had a pretty good grasp on the sources that were available to tell the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But since our methodology was to try to find every primary source on the topic, and because those sources were spread across the country, we began traveling or sending researchers out to begin gathering that material, and we were pleasantly surprised by the volume of material that we found. This case, the Mountain Meadows Massacre case, the legal case that arose from it, was considered one of the most celebrated cases of the 19th century. For that reason, many people looked into it — journalists, investigators, curiosity seekers and when they gathered information, that information went with them to the various states to which they were distributed. So we had to look across the country in dozens of states in many, many institutions and private collections to find the material. When we gathered it and brought it all together, we found that we had more pieces of the puzzle than anyone else had collected — so we could take those pieces of the puzzle, begin to fit them together and watch a picture emerge, the most complete picture that had been obtained for this massacre.
Glen M. Leonard:
As we tried to reconstruct the events of the week of the massacre, we found it extremely difficult even to set up a chronology because most of those who talked about it had not paid a lot of attention to that or had intentionally skewed the chronology. The Jensen materials and the Morris materials included affidavits and notes from interviews of people who were eye witnesses to many of those events. Some of that information, some of what they’d said had been previously available, and those were good clues to putting that story together. But, the new materials that had not been seen before added lavish detail, it allowed us to be certain of what was happening at the meadows, especially on those last couple of days and we were able to confirm and expand the story in ways that we would have never been able to do. You were there now and you can see what people were doing and saying and why what they did made a difference.
Clip #4: What impact did writing this book have on you?
What impact do you hope this book will have on readers?
Ronald W. Walker:
It’s been a difficult burden to bear to write this book — difficult in this sense that you have to confront this obscenity of terrible violence. That can’t help but weigh upon you. You can’t help but say, I wish I could just sort of jump in the fray and change this somehow and have a different result.
Richard E. Turley Jr.:
In the past some people have written about the Mountain Meadows Massacre from a kind of clinical distance or detachment, writing about it from an ivory pedestal with righteous indignation. And while we understand that approach, I personally believe having now waded now through the sordid details of the massacre that no one can really understand the horror of what happened there unless they immerse themselves in the detail enough to feel the emotions of that day. One contribution we hope our book makes is to lead readers into the story deeply enough that when they come to the massacre chapter they feel themselves there on the field, feeling some of the emotions that existed at that time, and feeling the heavy weight of what was about to happen — wanting to reach out and stop it and being unable now in the 21st century to do that. We hope that readers of our book will feel that emotion and then will act upon it to examine their own lives to figure out what they might do personally to improve their own tolerance of others, to improve their own behavior, so that they’re not inappropriately labeling people as their enemy and treating them that way.
Clip #5: How did you approach the question: “Was Brigham Young behind the ordering of the massacre?”
Richard E. Turley Jr.:
We were very much open to find any answer to the question of who did it and why. And we were open to the possibility that Brigham Young had a more direct role. We were open to whatever possibility the evidence showed. That’s why we’re so interested in getting to the primary sources. When we gathered those sources together and began to put the pieces of the puzzle together, we saw how the massacre unfolded. And we saw that it unfolded not in the kind of lock-step way that you would expect, had there been direct orders from Salt Lake City. But instead we saw a series of halting decision-making leading from one bad decision to another, from one discussion and meeting to another discussion and meeting, ultimately culminating in this atrocity. We also saw efforts of finger-pointing, after the fact, that were completely contradictory with the idea of someone topside giving direction. But at the same time, besides answering that question for ourselves about Brigham Young’s role, we also understood more fully how this kind of thing can happen, how good people can do the unthinkable. And that’s the part I think that engaged us the most emotionally. When we saw how ordinary people like ourselves could make one bad decision after another leading to the unthinkable, that’s when we began to examine ourselves and say, you know, these people may not have been that much different from ourselves or our neighbors today. And if that’s the case, then there must be in the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a lesson for all of us on how we should behave. Because we’d like to think of people who do the unthinkable — people who commit atrocities — as somehow categorically different from ourselves. When we recognize that they’re not that much different then it becomes very uncomfortable, and that kind of discomfort permeates the story that we tell, because as people walk through the Mountain Meadows themselves in our book, they look around and find that many of the people who are about to commit this heinous act are very much like they are. So I think that’s one of the great lessons we learned that this act was not committed by some grand villain dictating the terms. It was committed by ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, who got swept up the fear of the times and then didn’t do anything to stop it. They let it flow to committing an atrocity.
Ronald W. Walker:
I hope that’s one of the contributions of our book. So often the writing of Mormon history is a matter of accusation and finger-pointing. The writing of Mormon history has been burdened by this polarity — this “us versus them.” That didn’t make sense to us; this kind of approach didn’t make sense to us at all as we got into our research. What did make sense is the common sense conclusion that good people were on both sides of the question. And people were making very human errors. So we’ve tried to move the discussion from us versus them to a discussion of understanding. And as we did that what we really found was a discovery of human nature and how each one of us struggles with these forces that weigh upon us.
Clip #6: Is it possible that additional sources on the subject may surface in the future?
Ronald W. Walker:
I think readers should be assured that we left no stone unturned in the writing of this book. We know of no source that was withheld from us. Yet the exciting thing about history is this book may well generate new sources that we couldn’t find. It could well be that someone is going to find a journal or letter that will add additional information to this story. I think we’re pretty confident that we got the story right, and as new documents may be forthcoming, they’re not going to change the basic story that we’ve told. But there’s a dynamic quality to reconstructing the past. And it’s very possible we’re going to find a rich nugget that we wished we’d had when we wrote this book. I suspect that’s going to happen.