ourbrainhurts

Most Mormons know little about these dark corners of their history, usually because they are told that they should not give credence to anything that is not “faith promoting”, which is too bad. In the last year, I have done my own reading on the history of the LDS sect and on Joseph Smith in particular.

The Washington Post has a recent review of two books on Mormon history. The first, Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy by David Roberts, recounts the migration of Mormons to Utah in the mid-1850’s under Brigham Young’s leadership:

To save money and thereby maximize the number of Mormons able to make the trek, Young decided to forgo horse- and oxen-drawn wagons in favor of human-powered push carts. The handcarts cost a 10th of what wagons and draft animals did, and they promised to fill Utah with Mormons before too many gentiles arrived.

The journey of the handcart travelers from Iowa to Utah became a defining myth of Mormon history, the equivalent … of the voyage of the Mayflower in American colonial history. Subsequent generations of Mormons took pride in their descent from handcart pioneers; as with the Mayflower, more than a few of the claims of lineage were spurious.

[T]he mythmaking has a sinister aspect, crossing the line into historical cover-up. The handcart companies — as these traveling groups were called — suffered from hunger, disease, exposure and death; their mortality rate dramatically exceeded the average for overland companies, despite the fact that the Mormons traveled but half the distance covered by the much more numerous immigrants to California and Oregon. Most of the 3,000 handcart travelers treated the journey as a heavenly ordained test of their faith; Roberts, making compelling use of their diaries and other records, considers it a criminal fiasco imposed on the innocent migrants by the arrogant, unbending leaders of their church.

Throughout Devil’s Gate, Roberts shows great sympathy for the travelers but none for those who set them in motion.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre is a totally different story (Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy, Ronald W. Walker):

No such positive interpretation is possible regarding another, almost contemporary episode in early Mormon history. During the summer of 1857, an emigrant wagon train from Arkansas crossed Utah heading for California. The train had nearly cleared Mormon territory, reaching Mountain Meadows in the southeastern part of the settled region of Utah, when it was attacked by a band of Paiute Indians. Several members of the train were killed, and the survivors circled their wagons to defend themselves. After a few days of siege, a party of Mormons appeared and offered to escort the Arkansans past the Paiutes to safety. The Arkansans accepted the offer and filed out. A short distance from the wagons, the Mormons fell on the emigrants and massacred 120 adults and teenagers of both sexes, sparing only the young children.

For decades the leaders of the Mormon community concealed what happened at Mountain Meadows.

I recommend the following books if you want to understand the LDS sect:

• Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, Jon Krakauer — gives a rather broad overview of the more unsavory aspects of Mormon history, from its founding to the present; not a favorite of the LDS.
• Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Lyman Bushman — a scholarly bio of JS, by a Columbia University history professor and active Mormon; paints a more positive picture of JS than Fawn Brodie, though because he does deal with the historical evidence, as one Amazon reviewer put it, the review was “about as critical as you can get without being ex-communicated”.
• No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, Fawn M. Brodie