THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE

Globe, Volume II, Issue 153, 30 November 1874, Page 3

THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE

“ It wi’l be remembered,” writes the New York World, “ that in 1857, during the excitement caused among the Mormons by the movements of Albert Sydney Johnstone’s army on the Plains, a company of emigrants, numbering more than 120 persons, were basely murdered at a place called Mountain Meadows. The Mormons have been charged with this heinous crime, although they have let it be understood that the murderers were Indians. The murderers undoubtedly appeared to bo Indians, and perhaps there were some Indians among them, but the majority are believed on well-founded grounds of suspicion to have been Mormons disguised as Indians. One George A. Hicks, of Fort Hamilton, U. T,, who was cut oil from the Church of Latter-day Saints last April for apostasy, after thirty years of service with Mormanism, recently wrote to the Salt Lake Tribune giving his views as to the real criminals in the Mountain Meadows massacre. He says that he was excommunicated from the Mormon church for having reported in the Tribune that John D. Lee, a prominent leader and preacher of Mormonisra, had ridden into Kanarrah on the 7th of April of this year by the side of Brigham Young’s carriage. Young became angered at this, and hence the excommunication of Hicks. Hicks explains the Mormon prophet’s wrath by asserting that this Lee was the leader of the Mountain Meadows murderers, and that Young, who has made ail along a pretence of denouncing the murders, was provoked by the publicity given to the fact of his intimacy with the suspected or known ringleader in the massacre of the emigrants. Hicks relates further how in 1850 the doctrine of ‘ blood atonement’ was promulgated by the leading men of the Church—a doctrine whereby the Mormons were taught to close their eyes to the killing of even their nearest kinsmen if the sacrifice were demanded by the Church. The monument which marks the spot where the bones of the murdered emigrants lie is composed of redbrown granite stones, which cover a space 27ft long and Oft wide. The Rio Virgin flows near by, and there is probability that the graves will soon be washed away by the floods. Ho far not a man has ever suffered retribution for the barbarous crime.”