Mountain Meadows Massacre Site

On September 11, 1857, in a mountain valley in southwestern Utah, between 120 and 140 members of an Arkansas emigrant train were murdered under a flag of truce. The Baker-Fancher company — families named Baker, Fancher, Dunlap, Mitchell, Tackitt, Huff, Jones — had crossed the plains bound for California and found themselves in a territory bracing for war: Buchanan had declared Utah in rebellion, and a fifth of the U.S. Army was marching west. Brigham Young had closed the trails to emigrant resupply.

The siege lasted five days — the wagons circled in the meadows, the attackers initially presenting as Paiute raiders. Then the Mormon militia came under a white flag, promised safe passage, disarmed the emigrants — and killed them: the men shot, the women and older children killed with the help of Paiute allies. Seventeen children under eight were spared — too young, the killers judged, to tell the story. They were taken into Mormon homes and later returned to Arkansas by the federal government.

Only John D. Lee was ever tried — executed at the site twenty years later, in 1877, the scapegoat for an atrocity whose orders have been debated for a century and a half. The church's official account now acknowledges Mormon militia responsibility; the meadows hold the monuments and the graves of a massacre the territory spent decades blaming on the Paiutes who had been recruited into it.

Mountain Meadows is the archive's truce-flag file — the valley where a wagon train that surrendered under a white flag was slaughtered by the militia that promised it safety, and where seventeen children were the only witnesses small enough to be allowed to live.