In September of 1857, in a meadow about 300 miles south of Salt Lake City, a group of Mormon militiamen murdered 120 people. The victims were members of the Baker-Fancher wagon train, making their way from Arkansas to California. All adults in the emigrant party were massacred, along with 37 children. Only 17 children, all under age six, were spared.

The massacre was a ruthless cover up. Disguised as Paiute Indians, and aided by several Paiutes, the militia had attacked the wagon party several days earlier, killing some of its members. They intended to drive the party out of Utah Territory, as violently as necessary, and let the Paiutes receive any blame. But the emigrants resisted, fending off repeat attacks over several days. On the fifth day, a wounded emigrant discovered and managed to communicate to others that their attackers were not Paiutes, but Mormons. The news spread quickly among the party. The massacre was designed to prevent it from spreading further.

In the final attack, a militia leader entered the Baker-Fancher wagon fort under the false promise of a truce, convincing the party that the militia would escort them back to town. The children, women, and wounded left the camp first. The men and older boys followed, each one escorted by a militiaman. On signal, after marching about a mile, every militiaman in the line turned and shot the emigrant at his side. Up ahead, others emerged from hiding places to slaughter the children, women, and wounded.

The remains of the victims were buried haphazardly, their belongings distributed or destroyed. The 17 surviving toddlers were spared only because they were deemed too young to talk about what had happened. They were taken in and kept by Mormon families until two years later, when federal officials investigating the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it came to be called, returned them to Arkansas.

The Ballad

The “Ballad of the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” sung here by Pete Moore, has been attributed to one of the United States soldiers who – already en route to Utah to quell a possible Mormon rebellion – heard early reports of the atrocity:

The massacre sent shockwaves across the United States and beyond, both in the immediate aftermath of the event and in the decades that followed. Newspaper accounts, investigative reports, and histories flooded public discourse. (A great compendium of primary material can be found here). Literary works also appeared. In 1872, Mark Twain included a description of the massacre in Roughing It, his account of his travels during the west in the 1860s.

In 1886, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle equated Mormons with violence and murder by making Mormon militiamen the guilty party in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. Although Conan Doyle later apologized for his scathing portrayal of Mormons, it raised no eyebrows at the time. As an editor later noted, this was likely due to the widespread reports of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

For reasons obvious and not so obvious, the massacre remains a source of pain and controversy today, for the victims and their families as well as for Mormons. In 2014, Mormon leaders published an essay which discusses the massacre as part of a long history of bloody violence committed both against Mormons and by them. The general consensus is that the essay goes further in acknowledging blame for the massacre than the Mormons have ever gone before.

In this post I’ll explore the “Ballad of the Mountain Meadows Massacre” and a few others related to the crime. In a second post, I’ll briefly explore some ballads about Mormons and murder more generally (including the murder of Mormons themselves at the hands of violent mobs) that help explain, but not justify, the massacre. Together, these ballads further our ongoing study on this blog about how murder ballads “work”. How do they help us understand horrendous acts of violence? Or, at least, how do they help us understand ourselves in relation to such violence? These ballads also shed light on how folklore functioned in the United States during this period in general – including how the folk music of the western frontier was influenced by violent rhetoric coming from northern and southern states at the brink of the Civil War. Finally, they’ll shed a little light on how stories about the massacre are told through music today.

“Uncle Sam is bound to see this bloody murder through”

Let’s start with the lyrics to the ballad in the video above, attributed to U.S. soldiers:

Come, all you sons of liberty
Unto my rhyme give ear
‘Tis of a bloody massacre
You presently shall hear.

In splendor o’er the mountains
Some thirty wagons came
They were awaited by a wicked band.
O Utah, where’s thy shame?

In Indian colors all wrapped in shame,
This bloody crew was seen
To flock around this little train
All on the meadows green.

They were attacked in the morning
As they were on their way.
They forthwith corralled their wagons,
And fought in blood array.

Then came the captain of the band,
He surely did deceive,
Saying, “If you will give up your arms
We’ll surely let you live.”

And so they gave their weapons
In hopes their lives to save,
But the words were broken among the rest
Which sent them to their graves.

Both men and women, old and young,
A-rolling in their gore,
And such an awful sight and scene,
Was ne’er beheld before!

Their property was divided,
Among this bloody crew,
And Uncle Sam is bound to see
This bloody matter through.

The soldiers will be stationed
Throughout this Utah land,
All for to find those murderers out,
And bring them to his hand.

In 1857, at the time of the massacre, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been organized formally for less than thirty years. The Mormons been established in Utah for only ten, having been driven out of the Midwest by significant, often violent, public pressure.

I’ll explore this history a little more in the next post. For now, suffice it to say that by July of 1857, word had reached Utah that President Buchanan had dispatched the army to quell a potential Mormon rebellion, an expedition that came to be known as the Utah War. By early September, army representatives were already in Salt Lake City and the army itself was approaching the Utah border from Wyoming, led by Albert S. Johnston. They would eventually be slowed and then stopped by the onset of winter, not arriving in Utah until the following spring.

The folklorist Austin E. Fife made a compelling case that “Ballad of the Mountain Meadows Massacre” was composed and sung within a few weeks of the event by Johnston’s soldiers. Camped for the winter just outside Utah’s border, the soldiers would have had access to some basic early facts and rumors about the event. Further, they would have had confidence that United States army would soon occupy Utah, and faith in the ability of the government to identify the murderers and bring them to justice, the sentiments with which the ballad concludes. (Source)

“Too horrible and sickening for language to describe”

Brigham Young, at the time of the massacre the head of the Mormon Church and leader of the Utah Territory’s theocratic democracy, conducted an early investigation into the events. In early 1858, he sent his report to the government, claiming that the violence was the work of the Paiutes. By summer, Johnston’s army had entered Utah, along with a Peace Commission also sent by President Buchanan, and the standoff between the Mormons and the government was resolved. But the massacre hung heavily over the region and the nation, with swirling rumors about Mormon involvement threatening the already precarious relationship between the government and the Mormons. Not satisfied with Young’s report, in 1959 Congress tasked Brevet Major General James Henry Carleton to properly bury the remains of the victims, investigate the incident, and submit his own report.

When Carleton arrived at the massacre site, a year after the fact, he discovered a scene “too horrible and sickening for language to describe”:

The scene of the massacre, even at this late day, was horrible to look upon. Women’s hair, in detached locks and masses, hung to the sage bushes and was strewn over the ground in many places. Parts of little children’s dresses and of female costume dangled from the shrubbery or lay scattered about; and among these, here and there, on every hand, for at least a mile in the direction of the road, by two miles east and west, there gleamed, bleached white by the weather, the skulls and other bones of those who had suffered. A glance into the wagon when all these had been collected revealed a sight which can never be forgotten…a picture of human suffering and wretchedness on the one hand, and of human treachery and ferocity upon the other, that cannot possibly be excelled by any other scene that ever before occurred in real life. (Full report.)

Carleton identified John D. Lee as the militia major who, under orders from local Mormon leaders, led the final attack against the Baker-Fancher party. Altogether, his report claimed, some four dozen Mormon men were involved.

The report even included accounts of interviews with those who claimed that Brigham Young himself was responsible for ordering the attacks on the emigrants. In the report’s aftermath, Young excommunicated only Lee and one other Mormon from the church. And only Lee was indicted, tried (twice), and convicted. In 1877, he was executed by firing squad at the massacre site in front of a crowd of people.  Although Lee had initially also blamed the Paiutes, at his death he claimed that he was a scapegoat for Mormon leaders who had more directly planned and undertaken the killing. In writing on the morning of his execution, and in a memoir published posthumously, Lee went further, blaming Young directly for ordering the massacre, and for sending Lee to his death in “in a cowardly, dastardly manner”. The series of events fueled the already spreading allegations that Young himself might have ordered the massacre. (Allegations which The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to this day denies.)

Evolving ballads, evolving blame

As investigative details about the massacre became known, people used the “Ballad of the Mountain Meadows Massacre” to shape public perceptions about the crime. As the variants of the ballad collected by Fife demonstrate, the concluding stanzas in particular evolved quickly. Once expressing only certainty that the murderers — whoever they were — would be caught, the ballad’s concluding stanzas began to place blame on the Mormons generally, and on Young specifically:

His soldiers must be stationed
Throughout this Utah land
All for t’ seek those murderers out
An’ bring them to his hand

By order of their President
This evil deed was done
He was the leader of the Mormon Church
His name is Brigham Young!

(You can listen to this full version here).

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As Mormon sentiment grew against Lee individually, these concluding stanzas were further adapted, mitigating Young’s role and emphasizing Lee’s:

Their guns, they gave to angel Lee
T’ward Cedar they did go
They were attacked in Injun style
And gentile blood did flow

They melted down with one accord
Like wax before a flame
Men and women, young and old
And Utah bears th’ blame

At th’ order of old Brigham Young
This deed was done, you see
And th’ leader of that wicked band
Was Captain John D. Lee!

(You can listen to this full version here).

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Eventually, mention of Young fell away completely:

When Lee, the leader of the band,
His word to them did give
That if there arms they would give up
He’d surely let them live.

When once they’d given up their arms
Thinking their lives to save
The Mormon’s word was broken
And they went down to their grave.

The men marched out in single file,
A Mormon at his side,
Who neither had a white man’s heart
Or trace of white man’s pride.

At word from Lee the pistols blazed,
The women and children came.
They shot them down in Indian style,
O Utah where’s your shame!

Both men and women, old and young,
Rolling in their gore.
And such an awful sight and scene
Was never beheld before.

The property was divided
Among this bloody crew,
And Uncle Sam is bound to see
This bloody matter through!

(Source)

To Fife, rather than a natural “drift” of language, these variations were likely “a matter of conscious and willful change” – a “substitution of ideas to meet an urgent social need” to deflect blame from central church leadership to an isolated, sacrificial individual. “I am quite sure,” Fife stated, “that the singing of this ballad in varied and current social situations was of the greatest moment in crystallizing prejudices and sympathies which were a conditioning factor in Mormon relationships with the occupation army, in encouraging Mormon leaders to permit if not to foster the selection of John D. Lee as a scapegoat, and in creating such violent attitudes that the Mormons were in self-defense forced to make some public gesture to substantiate the claim that the church was not officially responsible.”

Quite a claim. Regardless of its accuracy, one thing is certain. From the disguises the militiamen donned during the initial attack on the Baker-Fancher party to Lee’s last words, the Mountain Meadows Massacre reveals the complex layers of identity, violence, and justice that early Mormons and their fellow Americans tried to negotiate — with the help of a little folk music — in nineteenth-century Utah.

Adapting the Songs to the Twentieth Century and Beyond

After Lee’s execution, Mormon and non-Mormon communities alike began to discourage the songs about the massacre, seeking to put the affair behind them. And, anyway, as Olive Burt notes in American Murder Ballads and their Stories (1958) and elsewhere, even if they had wanted to encourage them, it was simply difficult to do so on the frontier. “Many of these items were not published at all while others saw fame only briefly in the columns of the local newspapers,” Burt notes. “As a result true western ballads of murder…have been entirely lost, or are known only to the children of those who knew and sang them. These children are now, of course, old men and women. Some of the best examples of western murder ballads will be lost forever when these people die.”

But others live on, thanks in large part to Burt, Fife, and other historians and folklorists who began to collect and print the “Ballad of the Mountain Meadows Massacre” and related songs in the 1950s. If you haven’t read Burt’s American Murder Ballads, I recommend it. It’s full of great information, and Burt is a hoot. Her book also influences the work of contemporary story-tellers who continue to adapt the songs of the Old West.

Burt would be pleased at the technology available today to ensure these ballads survive and can be shared. She likely would also be pleased with the succession of writers and artists who have remained interested in preserving these American stories, and who have continued to adapt them to address their own pressing aesthetic, social, and political needs.

This succession is interesting to observe. At the turn of the century following the Mountain Meadow Massacre, stories about the event began to undergo another series of adaptations that again radically changed public perception, this time by re-imagining the victims. On the literary front, following at the heels of Twain and Conan Doyle, Jack London chose to describe the massacre from the viewpoint of a young member of the Baker-Fancher party in his novel The Star Rover (1915). His unique framing device rendered this a particularly radical viewpoint: London’s fictional narrator is a professor serving a life term for murder in San Quentin who, repeatedly tortured by prison officials, discovers he can manage physical pain by entering an “interstellar” trance state in which he experiences the lives of people in the past.

On the musical front, a range of individuals continued to make original songs about the massacre, most often adopting the viewpoints of the various victims. Today, these ballads dot the internet, forming their own little cosmos and allowing us to peer in at people singing in their own homes and studios. I like this one by Craig Breaden, which aims to capture Lee’s perspective as a (very complicated) victim:

And this one, which aims to capture the perspective of an innocent young female victim:

In the title track to Something in the Water the talented Sally Shuffield, an Arkansas native, takes a bird’s eye view of the victims:

More widely known perhaps are the folk songs of Rosalie Sorrels and Bruce “Utah” Phillips, both of whom documented broadly stories by and about Mormons in the Old West, including the Mountain Meadow Massacre. I’ll look at their work in more detail in the next post. For now, I conclude with Phillips’s “John D. Lee”:

A nice cover by The Blue Ribbon Tea Company:

You can read the lyrics to the song here.

In a short story offering some fascinating background to his song, Phillips underscores the difference between historical facts and folklore. Echoing Fife, he stresses the significantly greater power of the latter to influence human behavior. His story serves as a nice segue between this post and the next one. There, I’ll look briefly at another set of old murder ballads and their contemporary adaptations that help explain — but do not attempt to justify — the extreme violence of the Mountain Meadows Massacre by adopting a point of view from which it is the Mormons themselves who have been besieged and mortally betrayed. Here is Phillips’s story: