THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE 

On September 11, 1857, a group of Mormon settlers in southwestern Utah used false promises of protection to coax a party of California-bound emigrants from their encircled wagons and massacre them. The slaughter left the corpses of more than one hundred men, women, and children, strewn across a highland valley called the Mountain Meadows, located some 40 miles north of what later became St. George, Utah.

Multiple raids on emigrant wagon trains throughout Utah Territory, between September 7, and October 3, 1857, demonstrate that the wagon train massacred at Mountain Meadows was not the only one targeted. These assaults were motivated by political wrangling over federal and local rule and tensions between church and state that reached a deadly peak during the Utah War of 1857–58. This jostling for power between Latter-day Saints and federal authority continued long after the massacre. Attempts to wield the case as a political weapon resulted in justice delayed—and justice denied—for the innocent victims of the massacre and their families.