​Transcript: "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Responds to American Primeval" with Matthew Godfrey

John Turner: Welcome to Religion in the American Experience, a podcast of the private, digital first National Museum of American religion. I am your guest host, John Turner. I chair the Department of Religious Studies at George Mason University, and I'm a member of the Advisory Board of the National Museum of American Religion. Please follow us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you listen, and tell your colleagues, friends and family to do the same.
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On January 9th, 2025, Netflix released American Primeval, a series that uses the Mountain Meadows Massacre in southern Utah as a lens to explore frictions between Latter-Day Saints and other cultures in the Utah Territory during the latter half of the 19th century. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a statement addressing the series, which reads in part:  “A recently released streaming series presents a fictionalized interpretation of events in mid-19th century Utah. While historical fiction can be illuminating, this drama is dangerously misleading. Brigham Young, a revered prophet and courageous pioneer, is by any historical standard, egregiously mischaracterized as a villainous, violent fanatic. Other individuals and groups are also depicted in ways that reinforce stereotypes that are both inaccurate and harmful. As to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which the series inaccurately portrays as reflective of a whole faith group, the Church has long acknowledged and condemned this horrific tragedy. It has also taken significant steps to uncover and share the full truth of what happened and promote healing. The problem with such deceptive, graphic and sensationalized storytelling is that it not only obscures reality and hinders genuine understanding, but can foster animosity, hate, and even violence.”

The National Museum of American Religion, unaffiliated with any religion or religious organization, explores what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion. In that spirit, we feel it is important to provide an opportunity for the main subject in American Primeval, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to share its understanding of the historical record around Brigham Young, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the Church's efforts to establish itself in the 19th century Great Basin. To that end, we have invited Dr. Matt Godfrey.

Matthew C. Godfrey is a general editor of the Joseph Smith Papers and a senior historian in the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He holds a PhD. in American and Public History from Washington State University. Matt has authored or co-edited several books, including The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, published by the University of Utah Press in 2018, and Religion, Politics and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government and the Utah Idaho Sugar Company from Utah State University Press, published in 2007. He's also been an editor of Five Volumes in the Joseph Smith Paper Series. Matt, thank you so much for being with us today.
 
Matt Godfrey: Yeah. Thank you, John. It's a pleasure for me to be here and I'm excited about our conversation.
 
John: Great. So am I. So that our listeners can understand the background, could you introduce them to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as found in the Utah Territory of the 1850s?
 
Matt: Yeah. I'll try to be brief with this, but just to give a little bit of background to the church prior to this point, the church was organized in 1830 in New York by Joseph Smith. Joseph at the time was 24 years old, and he said that in 1820, so 10 years prior to the church's organization, he'd been visited by God and Jesus Christ, who had told him that the true church of Jesus Christ was not on the earth and told him that it would be restored at some point. Three years after that, when he was 17, he said that an angel appeared to him and told him about gold plates that existed in a hill not far from his house, and that these plates contained a record of the dealings of God and Jesus Christ with ancient inhabitants of the American continents, and so Joseph obtained that record. He said he translated it by the gift and power of God, and it was published in 1830, just about a month before the church was organized. The Book of Mormon, and so that's a book that we accept as another book of scripture comparable to the Bible.

After the church was organized, one of its key components was that a Zion community would need to be built here on the American continent by the Saints before Jesus Christ would return to the earth, and so to do that, Joseph Smith preached the gospel of the gathering, meaning that people, church members across the world would convert, but then they would gather to the central Zion location. They tried to set up Zion in a couple of different places. First of all, in Jackson county, Missouri, in 1831, there's about 1200 Saints that tried to establish that community. They were violently driven out of the county in the fall of 1833 and made their way to another county in Missouri, where again they were trying to establish Zion. In 1838, they ran afoul again of people who are not members of the church in Missouri, and this culminated in a series of violent of events that occurred again in the fall of 1838.
 
The Governor of Missouri issued what was called the Extermination Order, which gave the state militia of Missouri the right to shoot any Latter-Day Saint living within its territory or force them to leave the state, and so with that, the Saints had to move from Missouri. They moved into Nauvoo, Illinois, where they lived once again began to build their community. Again, they faced difficulties with people who were not members of their faith, and this again turned violent. In 1844, Joseph Smith was assassinated by a mob as he was being held in Carthage Jail for a couple of different reasons. Once this happened, Brigham Young, who was then the head of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which was the next governing body in the church, became the leader of the Church, and he was the one who orchestrated the removal of the Saints from Illinois in 1847 because of threats against the lives of the Saints. They made their way over into Utah Territory, the first vanguard, in 1847, and then more and more Latter-Day Saints followed after that.

By the time this series picks up in 1857, the Saints had only been in Utah Territory about 10 years. Congress had created the territory in 1850, they'd appointed Brigham Young as the Governor of Utah Territory at that time, so he had both an ecclesiastical and a governmental position. He was also appointed the Commissioner of Indian affairs in Utah Territory as well, so he held that position too. The Saints were just trying to get their communities off the ground, they were hoping that they would be in an area where they would not be bothered anymore by people not of their faith because they had had such violent encounters in the past with people driving them out of different locations. I think that kind of provides some background as to where we are in 1857.
 
John: We'll talk about the relationship between the Saints and the rest of the country or the US Government in a few minutes, but I'm hoping you could tell us a little bit more about Brigham Young, who is a key figure in American Primeval. Who was he? Can you give us a bit of a biographical sketch, maybe getting us up to the 1850s?
 
Matt: Sure. Yeah. Brigham had been born in Vermont in 1801. He had a little bit of a difficult childhood, his mother passed away when he was 14 years old. He was apprenticed out at the age of 16, I believe, and left his family at that time. His father was kind of a harsh disciplinarian, so I don't think Brigham was overly sad to be leaving his home at the age of 16. He first encountered the church in 1830, when he first heard about the Book of Mormon, but it took him a couple of years before he actually joined the Church, before he converted, so that didn't happen until 1832, but once Brigham converted to the Church, he was all in. He was a very loyal supporter of Joseph Smith. He started to kind of advance in the ranks of Church government. When Joseph Smith called the first 12 apostles in the church in 1835, Brigham was one of the ones called at that time.
Joseph began to give Brigham more and more responsibility. When the Saints were expelled from Missouri in 1838, since Joseph was in jail at that time, it was actually Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball that kind of orchestrated the removal of the Saints from Missouri into Illinois, and so he was instrumental in that.

Then from about 1839 to 1841, Brigham served a very successful mission, along with several others of the Twelve Apostles to England, where there were many people who were converted at that time, and Brigham and the rest of the Twelve were beloved by those who converted to the Church in England at that time. As I mentioned before, when Joseph Smith was killed in 1844, the leadership of the Church then passed to Brigham and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He led the Church as the head of the Twelve Apostles until 1847, when he reorganized what was called the First Presidency, which was the main and kind of the head governing body of the Church, and so Bergen became the president of the church itself in 1847. He had two counselors assisting him at that time. As I mentioned, he had that ecclesiastical role, and then he also had a very strong temporal role in the settlement of Utah as the territorial Governor, as the Indian affairs superintendent.
 
John: How does the depiction of Brigham Young in American Primeval compare with the historical record, what if anything, do they get right about him, and what do they get that seems wrong to you?
 
Matt: Yeah. I think they portray Brigham as kind of a very frank person who's not afraid to speak his mind and to take charge, which I think is pretty accurate of Brigham, but I think the main issue that I have with the depiction of Brigham in American Primeval is that he kind of seems like a one dimensional character, that he's just kind of the main villain of the story, that he's not nuanced at all, and that he kind of has evil intentions all the time, and that's not what I see Brigham as being. He certainly had a rough side to him, and in public he could preach sermons that were very fiery, that could be interpreted, we can talk a little bit more about this later, but that could be interpreted as trying to incite violence, but I don't think Brigham was a violent person at heart. I think outside of kind of his fiery public announcements that he used to try to awaken the Saints to their responsibilities, I think at heart he really was a peaceful person, I think you see this throughout his life, that he was never personally violent with people. When the Saints were experiencing conflict in Illinois after Joseph Smith's death, Brigham wasn't trying to awaken the Nauvoo Legion, the Saints militia, to go and attack other people, he very much was trying to reconcile so that the Saints could stay and build their temple, but eventually they had to leave in order to avoid more violence against them. I think that's kind of the main issue that I have, I don't think he was a violent person, I certainly don't believe he was an evil person, I think he was someone that tried his best to proclaim the gospel of peace to Latter-Day Saints and tried to get them to do what he saw was their duty as members of the church.
 
John: What was the Utah War, Matt? That's the backdrop of the Netflix series, and if people maybe learn Utah history in secondary school, they might be familiar, but that's something that a lot of Americans probably haven't heard of, so what was the Utah War?
 
Matt: Yeah. This was an interesting incident that occurred with Utah in the 1850s. As I mentioned, Brigham Young is the territorial Governor of Utah, and he and the Saints kind of want to be left alone. Before Congress created the territory of Utah, Brigham and other church leaders were hoping that they would create the state of Deseret, because I think he believed that it was a state then they would have less interference from outside sources, but Congress created Utah as a territory, and so because of that, there were territorial officials who were brought to Utah, judges and other officials to try to regulate the territory, and the Saints didn't always have great relations with these other officials. In the 1850s, there's a period of time from 1856 into 1857 called the Reformation, where Brigham and other church leaders believed that the Saints weren't being as obedient as they should be, he believed they needed to renew their commitments to the gospel and to God, and so there was a lot of kind of fiery discourse at this time, especially against people who the Saints might label as apostates or dissenters, people who are leaving the church.
Because of this, word kind of starts getting back through some of these federal officials to President James Buchanan, that church members aren't letting territorial officials do their job, that they are very much opposed to outside forces. There's a proclamation that the Utah Territorial Legislature sends to Washington D.C, the legislature is made up almost entirely, if not entirely, of Latter-Day Saints at the time, and this proclamation kind of reinforces this notion that the Saints don't want to bow to federal sovereignty because some of the language in it. President Buchanan believes that the Saints are actually in rebellion against the federal government because of these things that he's heard, because of this proclamation, so he decides that he's going to remove Brigham Young as territorial Governor and appoint Albert Sessions, or Alfred Sessions, which is...
 
John: Cummings.
 
Matt: Cummings. Sorry. Thank you. Albert Cummings as the Governor of Utah. In order to make sure that the Saints allow Cummings to be put into place as the Governor, Buchanan says he's going to send a military force with Cummings to put him into place, and so there's a contingent of about at least 1500 soldiers that begin to march to Utah in order to ensure the Cummings is put into place and to ensure that the Saints aren't in rebellion against the federal government.

They set off in 1857. When Brigham Young and other church leaders hear about this approaching army, they fear the worst because they've already gone through the experience of being expelled from Missouri, of being expelled from Illinois, and so they are concerned that these soldiers are going to come into Utah Territory, they're going to take their lands and their property again and kind of kick them out of the territory, and so Brigham decides that the Saints need to be prepared for when the soldiers come in. He counsels them to not sell any grain to any passing immigrant companies because the Saints need it for themselves. He's concerned that at some point they're going to have to withdraw into the mountains, and so they're going to need all the grain, all the food that they can get. He also sends out some groups to try to slow the army down so that they don't enter Utah Territory in 1857. Some of these people go out, they burn some of the supply trains of the military and try to harass them in other ways in order to prevent them from coming into Utah Territory.

The soldiers don't actually enter the territory until 1858. By the time they actually come in, Buchanan's kind of thought better about this whole approaching army and what's going on, and through Thomas Kane, they're able to reach a peaceful settlement between the Saints and the federal government. There's actually, not any fighting that actually takes place between the soldiers and the Latter-Day Saints at the time, but it kind of created this heightened tension in the territory where the Saints believed that there was a threat approaching, they believed they needed to kind of hunker down and be even more insular against outside forces, and so that's kind of briefly the Utah War.
 
John: We are talking about the Netflix series American Primeval and its relationship to history with Matt Godfrey, a historian at the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Matt, let's shift gears just a little bit. What indigenous peoples were in the Utah Territory as of the mid-1850s?
 
Matt: Yeah. When the Saints arrive in what will become Utah Territory, there are several groups of indigenous peoples already living in the area, and they've been there for many years before the Saints ever got there. This is kind of a rough depiction of where they were, but just generally, you had Shoshones in northern Utah., you had Goshutes who were in western Utah, you had the Utes, the Ute tribe kind of in central Utah, and then southern Utah, you had the Paiutes, and so these were kind of the four major indigenous groups who were in Utah Territory at that time.
 
John: What does the historical record say about the Church's attitude towards and relationships with these peoples, both in general and during the time of the Utah War?
 
Matt: Yeah. I think there was kind of a complicated relationship that the church had because of teachings that are in the Book of Mormon, which is supposed to be a record of civilizations who were ancestors of indigenous groups in north and South America, and had great promises for these groups that they would be instrumental as well in kind of ushering in Jesus Christ's second coming, because of that, I think Latter-Day Saints from the organization of the church in the 1830s believed that they had a missionary responsibility to go and inform native groups about the Book of Mormon to try and convert natives to the gospel. There was kind of this rich proselytizing aspect that the church had towards native American groups, and you see this in Joseph Smith's lifetime as well, that there are different missions that are sent out to try to convert natives to the church, but most church members are from white European descent, and like most Americans at the time, I think they held prejudice views about native Americans. They believed that they were kind of degraded, that they were not as advanced as white people were, and so you had these complications as well. When you have the Saints coming over into the Great Basin and trying to claim territory for themselves, then they begin to run afoul of these native groups who have been living in the area for 100s of years prior to that time, and there's two kind of different views of property that these two groups have.

The white Americans, Latter-Day Saints, like most Americans at the time, believe they could go in, they could make treaties with native groups and then claim territory for themselves, but the natives didn't necessarily see property in the same way, and they also believed that if they weren't going to be able to use traditional hunting grounds or traditional territories because whites were settling on it, that there needed to be compensation, and so sometimes they would take livestock and cattle from white communities as kind of what they would see as compensation for them living on these lands. There were disagreements that existed between the two groups. I think Brigham Young and other church leaders tried to put into place a peace policy towards native Americans where they believed that it was better to try to establish peaceful relationships with them rather than to fight them or to harm them, and so there's different groups like the Shoshones. Brigham Young was friends with the tribal chief of the Shoshones, Washaki. There are several members of the Shoshone tribe that will convert to the church at some point, but of course, there are conflicts that do break out between Latter-Day Saints and native American groups.

In the 1850s, there is what's known as the Walker War between the Latter-Day Saints and members of the Utes that end in the killing of several native Americans. Later on in the 1860s, there'll be what is known as the Circleville Massacre, where Latter-Day Saint communities in southern Utah kill some of the Paiute tribe down there, and so you do have kind of these violent outbreaks that occur, but I think generally, Brigham Young preached a policy of peace, and he hoped that Latter-Day Saints would follow that for the most part, rather than trying to fight and kill native Americans.
 
John: What was the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and how does the depiction of that event in American Primeval differ with historians understanding of it?
 
Matt: Yeah. The Mountain Meadows Massacre is really a horrific event that occurs in Utah Territory. It's something that occurs kind of in this heightened tension that I was describing because of the approaching army that's coming. Since the Latter-Day Saints were in the Great Basin, that area was kind of on the route of people who were migrating to California, and so since the late 1840s, there have been many immigrant groups who had passed through Utah Territory on their way to California and had passed through peacefully without any issues, but in 1857, you've hard a group of immigrants who were going to California from Arkansas, and as they kind of went into Utah Territory because Brigham Young had told the Saints that he wanted them to preserve grain, he didn't want them to sell grain or ammunition to any passing immigrant groups, there were some issues that sprang up because the Fancher party, this group of immigrants, needed grain, they were hoping to buy grain and hoping to get flour and other things from the Saints, but the Saints were refusing to sell it to them or would only sell it to them at exorbitant prices, and so this led to tensions between the two groups.
 
You also had the Saints were, I think, feeling because of the approaching army, rather they were kind of seeing outside groups with trepidation, and I think having an immigrant group come in from Arkansas was especially troubling to them because earlier one of their apostles, Parley P. Pratt, had been murdered in Arkansas, and so I think Latter-Day Saints, who had heard reports of that kind of thought people from Arkansas were not their friends because of that. There's tensions that occur, there's verbal clashes that occur between the Fancher party and Latter-Day Saints as they make their way through Utah, and it gets to the point that as they're going through Cedar City, the community of Cedar City, which is about 50 miles north of St. George, Utah and southern Utah, they're traveling through Cedar City, and there's, again, some verbal clashes that occur with some of the residents in Cedar City because they won't sell the Fancher group grain.

This leads some of the leaders of the church in the area, especially Isaac Haight, who was kind of the president of the church in the area, what we call a stake president, he decided that he wanted to kind of teach this immigrant group a lesson. He initially thought that what they could do is try to get some of the Paiute Indians in the area to go and steal some of the cattle from these native groups, but as this kind of raid occurred, there were some Latter-Day Saints who were participating as well, there were some people who were killed in that, and this led to kind of a siege against the entire Fancher party. The reason for that is that they were worried that the Fancher party would go to California, would say, hey, we had these white Latter-Day Saints work up the native Americans and fire on us as well, and that it would just evoke even more issues with Latter-Day Saints. Some of the Fancher party said that they were going to unite with the approaching soldiers and try to kick the Saints out, which I'm sure was just heated rhetoric at the time, but Latter-Day Saints were worried about that, and so Isaac Haight decides that he thinks that they need to kind of take care of this group so that it doesn't reach California.

He goes to a council of other church leaders in the area and kind of presents this idea to them, and the council says, kind of, what are you talking about, just let them go, you don't need to do anything with this group. They also ask Isaac if you ask Brigham Young what you should do in this matter, and Isaac says, no, and so they decide to send an express rider to travel to Salt Lake to ask Brigham Young's advice on what they should do, but after this council, Isaac does not heed the counsel that he's been given by these other church leaders. He, together with John D. Lee, decide that they will attack the immigrant train, and they decide to recruit some Paiutes to help them in this attack and kind of work up the Paiutes against this immigrant train, tell them that they're no friends of the Paiutes and that they need to kind of do what the Latter-Day Saints say.
 
What happens, there's a siege that takes place of the Fancher party by John D. Lee and some of the militia in the area. It begins on September 7th and continues. There's skirmishes that occur. The Fancher party kind of circle their wagons for protection, and on September 11th, 1857, they decide that they're going to just kill the entire group. Well, the decision was made before that, but this occurs on September 11th. Under a false flag of truce, John De Lee and others march the men from the Fancher party out beyond where their wagons are circled, they tell them to leave their ammunition and everything behind, and then on a pre-arranged signal, they kill all of the men. The Paiutes come out as well to attack some of the women and children, but there's also Latter-Day Saints that are killing the women and children as well.

When it's all said and done, there's about 120 of the Fancher party who are killed by this attack. The only ones who remain, there are 17 children, ages six or under, that they don't think will remember or be able to identify who it was that attack the train. Everybody else is killed in the Fancher party, and those 17 children are kind of taken into foster homes in the southern Utah community where they stay until 1859 when the federal government's able to re-unite them with family members in Arkansas.

This is a really horrific event that occurs at the time. It's something that you can't really explain why it happened, how they got to the point where they were able to do this against these people.

Some of the things that I think American Primeval gets wrong about this, there's some details that occur that are not accurate. It kind of portrays this massacre is taking place just outside of Fort Bridger, which isn't the case, it takes place down in Cedar City or just beyond Cedar City in Mountain Meadows, which is 100s of miles away from Fort Bridger.

There's also this depiction in American Primeval that you have a Latter-Day Saint family who's with the Fanchers, that's not correct either. There weren't any Latter-Day Saints traveling with the Fanchers. It also kind of depicts the Paiutes as wanting to save some of the women in the group and then they subsequently sell them to the Shoshoni's, which isn't accurate at all. For one, the Paiutes were not, you know, that that wasn't anything that they wanted to happen, have happened, they weren't trying to save women for sexual assault or whatever else, and they didn't have interaction with the Shoshonis because again, the Paiutes are in southern Utah, the Shoshonis are up in northern Utah, so there's no kind of interaction that occurs there.

You also see in American Primeval that they have kind of this Mormon militia group annihilate both US soldiers who are trying to investigate the Mountain Meadows massacre., and then they annihilate the Shoshonis and as well, and neither of those are accurate. As I mentioned, there weren't any soldiers that entered Utah Territory until 1858 after the Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred, and when the soldiers and other groups investigated this incident, there was no kind of mass killing of people trying to investigate it. The massacre that occurs with the Shoshonis actually occurs a few years after the Mountain Meadows Massacre, it occurs in 1863, and it's done by the US army, not by Latter-Day Saint settlers. This occurs up in Bear River, it's called the Bear River Massacre, where there are hundreds of Shoshonis that are wiped out by the U.S army at that time. Another really horrific event that, again, it doesn't have, it's not the Latter-Day Saints who are massacring the Shoshonis of that time.

I think those are some of the details that it gets wrong. I also found when I was watching it that the massacre kind of seemed to be ripped out of its context a little bit, there wasn't anything that tried to explain kind of what was going on in the larger territory or what was going on with the Latter-Day Saints or any kind of context behind the massacre. Not that that excuses the massacre at all, but I think having that larger historical context is helpful when you are dealing with such a horrific event. Then also, it wasn't just kind of this one day thing that happened, there was this siege over four days that occurred with the main massacre happening on the fourth day of the siege, it wasn't kind of this surprise at attack on the Fanchers where everybody is wiped out in like a matter of minutes.
 
John: It sounds like the makers of the show used it as a sort of starting point for their story, and they got a lot of things wrong or out of context, but there was this really dark, grim episode in September 1857. How has the church responded to that dark moment in its history, how open has it been about it or how open is it?
 
Matt: Yeah. I think initially church members were not open about it, and in fact, those who lived in the southern Utah community where this occurs, kind of there was kind of this vow of silence, don't talk about this, and if you do talk about it, blame it on the Paiutes, which is unfortunate, but that's what happened for many decades that Latter-Day Saints would blame Paiutes for the massacre and say that they had no part of it. There's also kind of a feeling that Brigham Young tried to cover up the massacre as well, and I think there have been different historians who have argued that. I think Richard Turley and Barbara Jones Brown, they have a book that came out, I believe, last year that deals with the aftermath of the massacre, and I think in that book, they provide some pretty convincing evidence that Brigham told federal officials on several different occasions that he would cooperate with them in trying to bring people to justice who had done this, but that he wasn't taken up on the offer for various reasons until the 1870s, which is really when there was a concerted effort to try to bring people to justice for this.

There were two people who were excommunicated from the church or their church membership was removed. Isaac Haight was ex-communicated, as was John D. Lee. There were about, I think, nine individuals who were indicted by a federal grand jury, which included Latter-Day Saints, for their role in the massacre. Only one person was convicted, and that was John D. Lee, and he was executed for his role in the massacre. I think for much of the 19th century and early 20th century, again, I don't think church members were very forthcoming about the massacre, and they would blame the Piutes for it.

In 1950, a historian who was a member of the church, Juanita Brooks, who was from southern Utah and kind of had heard rumors about the massacre for many years, wrote a very important book called the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which is the first scholarly treatment of what happened at Mountain Meadows. When Juanita published this book, she said she was shunned by her Latter-Day Saint community at the time for daring to kind of talk about this and showing that there was very much a white Latter-Day Saint involvement in this and that they were the ones who planned it and that it's not the Paiutes who are committing these outrages, it's Latter-Day Saints who were planning it and then bringing in some Paiutes to help them.

I think more recently, the church itself has tried to be more forthcoming about the massacre and has also tried to kind of repair relations with descendants of those in the Fancher party. In 1990, there was a memorial that was set up at Mountain Meadows. There's two memorials there for the victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and you had Rex Lee, who at the time was the president of Brigham Young University, is also a descendant of John D. Lee, who was there with descendants from the Fancher Party in kind of a moment of reconciliation for them.

Then in 2007, with the 150th anniversary of this terrible event, Henry B. Eyring, who at the time was a member of the church's first presidency, in a ceremony held down at Mountain Meadows, again with many of the descendants of the Fancher Party, gave a formal apology for Mountain Meadows, stated that the church had profound regret for what was done there, but also emphasize that this is an aberration with the church, that the church is a peaceful church, that it preaches the gospel of peace of Jesus Christ, and that the massacre was not something that was typical of church members, that was a horrible aberration.
 
In 2008, the church had three historians, Richard Turley, Ronald Walker, and Glenn Leonard, go and start really investigating thoroughly Mountain Meadows to write kind of a comprehensive history of it, and so they and their research assistants scoured the archives throughout the United States for documents on Mountain Meadows. They had access to every document that the church had pertaining to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and their work has culminated in actually three different publications. The first one was called Massacre at Mountain Meadows, it was a book that was released in 2008 that, again, was this scholarly treatment of Mountain Meadows and of the church's role in it. In 2017, they published Mountain Meadows Massacre, Collected Legal Papers with University of Oklahoma Press, which is a documentary edition of all the documents surrounding legal efforts to bring people to justice, and especially John D. Lee, so it's a tremendous resource for trying to understand the massacre itself. Then finally, 2023, Richard Turley and Barbara Jones Brown published Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and its Aftermath, which was supposed to be about kind of the aftermath of the massacre and bringing people to justice, but also focused quite a bit on the massacre itself again, and I think they had some really good insights and new insights into that.
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I should mention, too, that also in 2007, on that sesquicentennial, there was an article that Richard Turley published in the church's magazine for adults called the Ensign at the time, and this was a very forthright discussion of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and of the church's role in it. I think the church has been more forthcoming in the recent past about this, and there really have been a lot of efforts to reach out to descendants of the Fancher Party and to try to have reconciliation between the groups.
 
John: Well, Matt, thank you for that deep dive into the actual history and then some of the ways that the church has interacted with its own history over the years, that's really helpful. As we conclude, do you want to share any additional lessons or takeaways from these topics, either in terms of important historical transformations that you are charting or in terms of helping us better understand our present moment in the American narrative?
 
Matt: Yeah. That's a great question. There's a couple things that I think are important, both from this episode as well as its depiction in American Primeval. The first one is I think we need to really come to grips with the power of rhetoric in our society, and I think that's an especially good lesson right now, where our country is pretty divided and there's a lot of hateful rhetoric that is on display right now. I think sometimes it's easy to say, well, you're just saying things, and it won't really have an impact, but rhetoric matters, and I think it mattered in 1857 with the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I think if you didn't have these tensions with the approaching army, if you didn't have some of the fiery rhetoric that Brigham and other church leaders displayed, if you also didn't have kind of fiery rhetoric on the side of the federal government against the Latter-Day Saints, I think the Mountain Meadows Massacre could have been avoided, I don't think it would have happened except that you did have all of that rhetoric going around. I think things that we say, things we write on social media do have an impact, and I think we need to be aware of that.

In terms of American Primeval, I think it's also important to note how hurtful and harmful stereotypes can be, because I think when you watch American Primeval, in some ways I'm more offended at the way that native American groups are depicted in that show than I am with the way Latter-Day Saints are, because it seems like for whatever reason, these depictions of indigenous groups go back to kind of this 19th century view of them being just violent warriors who are out to kill anyone they can and rape women and do other horrible things, and that's not the way indigenous groups were. Maybe they were outlying people that were, but as a whole that's not how these groups in Utah acted at all. I think Darren Perry, who's the formal chairman of the Northwestern Band of Shoshoni, he wrote an op-ed in the Deseret News that was published in January that kind of talked about this, about the way his people were depicted, that it kind of went back to these old stereotypes. I think all that stereotyping does, whether it's of native American groups, whether it's of Brigham Young or Latter-Day Saints, is it just promotes hate as well, and I think we see that again in our society today, that if we stereotype people, if we take these positions that everybody is one way in a certain group and because of that, everyone in that group is evil, I think that's really harmful as well. Those are kind of my two takeaways from this.
 
John: We have been talking with Matt Godfrey, a historian at the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and if you have enjoyed this episode, we have two things we'd love for you to do. Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please write a review and encourage other people to listen as well.

Matt, thank you so much for giving your time to help us understand what the historical record reveals about Brigham Young, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 19th century Great Basin, which understanding in turn better equips us to perfect and perpetuate the American experiment in self- government. It was informative and enlightening, so thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed the time with us as well.
 
Matt: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it.