American Experience (1988) s19e13 Episode Script

1
NARRATOR: Tonight, a special
presentation from American
Experience and Frontline.
It is one of the world's
fastest-growing religions.
Its members project pride in
their faith and confidence in
their future.
They walk the corridors of
power, leaders in Congress and
even running for President.
But for the Mormons,
it was nt always so.
In the 19th century, to call
someone a Mormon was akin to
calling someone a
Muslim terrorist.
NARRATOR: Tonight, Frontline
and American Experience join
forces to tell the story of one
of the most powerful, feared and
misunderstood religions
in American history.
A column of light appeared in
his room, and then a person came
down, very glowing person.
He says he's
the angel Moroni.
And so, he begins to tell Joseph
about the Book of Mormon.
NARRATOR: This is the story
of Joseph Smith and the
revelations that gave birth to a
new faith born in America.
What outraged the traditional
Christians of the day was that
this guy comes along, and he
says, "I am the prophet
for this new age. "
NARRATOR: This story
of religious conflict and
persecution
When that mob stormed
Carthage Jail and shot the
prophet Joseph, they thought
they were finishing off
Mormonism as a movement.
NARRATOR: and the story of
a people who crossed a continent
to establish their own
spiritual kingdom.
Brigham Young is telling the
federal government to back
off from the Utah territory.
"We will take care of ourselves. "
NARRATOR: And of a church
that for decades defied society
by embracing polygamy and
then abruptly abandoning it.
Glory, glory
hallelujah glory ♪
How do you go from being
the ultimate outcast to the
embodiment of the mainstream in
two generations?
It's a breathtaking
transformation.
of a modern religion still full
of old missionary zeal
It was, for all intents and
purposes, mandatory for young
men to go on missions.
You go, you go, you go.
Dad went, grandpa went.
NARRATOR: a culture proud
of its strong communities
and close-knit families
The church and my
family are so intertwined.
It just creates a kind of
aura of love and peace.
NARRATOR: but a church
that will exile those who
defy its authority and its
teachings
Being gay in that
culture is beyond hell.
I was committing a kind
of spiritual suicide.
NARRATOR: and yet a faith
that offers its followers
powerful spiritual gifts.
The temple exists as a kind
of vehicle through which
we conquer mortality.
Not a single atom or particle of
our bodies will be lost, but
everything will be reconstituted
as fully as it was.
It's almost a kind of
celebration of the totality of
triumph over death.
NARRATOR: Tonight, the epic
story of this very American religion
the history, the
controversies and the
mysteries of the Mormons.
American Experience is made
possible by the Alfred P. Slon
Foundation to enhance public
understanding of the
role of technology.
The Foundation also seeks to
portray the lives of the men
and women engaged in scientifc
and technological pursuit.
And the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting.
Funding for Frontline and
American Experience is made
possible by viewers like you.
Thank you.
Additional funding for
Frontline is provided by The
Park Foundation.
awareness.
Additional funding for The
Mormons is provided by:
and others.
NARRATOR: At a certain point,
every religion must explore its
sacred past.
What shards of history
have survived?
What is myth, what is symbol?
Where does man end
and god begin?
And what is the shadow side?
It took Christianity almost
2,000 years to look at its
founding stories
with modern eyes.
The Mormon sacred stories are so
new they still smell
of the earth.
One of the things that many
scholars have said about the
claims of Mormonism is that when
a faith is born in the 19th
century, it's very hard to hide
in the mist of time.
There isn't that patina of
centuries, so that from the
moment of its birth, Mormons
were under a klieg light.
They were the center of
attention in ways that early
Christians just weren't.
NARRATOR: Mormon history
begins with Joseph Smith.
He is the alpha and omega of the
Latter-day Saints.
To the Mormons, Joseph Smith is
their prophet, their American
Mohammed who revealed new and
eternal truths.
To the world, he is one of the
most complex figures in
religious history, the enigma at
the core of this religion.
Superficially, one thinks of
revealed religions as providing
answers, and Smith provides as
many questions as
he does answers.
Nobody is exempt from struggling
with who he is.
Whether you're an insider or an
outsider, thinking about Smith
causes you to struggle, and that
struggle brings as much of you
into the question as it does
Smith himself.
He's a bit of a religious
Rorschach test.
Joseph Smith is one of the
most fulsome figures in 19th
century American history; a
visionary, an organizer, a
schemer, a mover of people, an
inventor of a religion a
religion that brought polygamy
to American society someone
who was assassinated.
Smith's claims are, in fact,
extravagant, extraordinary.
He's way out there at the end of
a diving board.
He's claiming a miracle in
America, he's claiming a miracle
having seen an angel, he's
claiming the creation of a new
biblical text that he is
delivering through a revelation.
I think behind every great
religious figure there's
probably not a little charlatan.
There's definitely a lot of
shadow, and that's what makes
them interesting.
The people who are unendingly
good and unendingly by the book
hold no interest for history. HÇá
They hold no
interest for people.
I mean, they're not the people
that inspire other people to do
crazy things like trek across
the plains and settle
in the great basin.
Joseph inspired
people to do that.
He inspired women to love him.
He inspired a lot of
women to love him.
( chuckles )
He inspired men, men of the
caliber of Brigham Young,
to love him, to love him
passionately, to devote their
whole life to
accomplishing his vision.
Joseph was a prophet.
He is the equal of Mohammed,
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Josiah, Moses
as the founder of a real,
bona fide, new religion.
NARRATOR: Joseph Smith's
story begins quietly enough
on a rural New England farm.
But this seemingly ordinary boy
would go on to a life of such
drama and tumult that at the end
he would say despairingly to his
friends, "You don't know me.
No man knows my history.
I cannot tell it.
If I had not experienced what I
had, I would not have
believed it myself. "
He was born on December 23,
1805, in Sharon, Vermont, the
third son of a family
of nine children.
Both of his parents descended
from proud religious
non- conformity.
They were downwardly mobile
gentry who, through hard luck
and bad judgment, always
seemed to live on the edge.
The family moved on to Palmyra,
New York, where they bought
a small farm on rocky land.
It was a place and a time where
seers and prophets roamed the
countryside, each claiming
to possess God's truth.
If you want to think about
the fertility of religion in the
early 19th century, think of
mushroom soil the richest
stuff you can imagine that will
grow almost anything and there
you have what it was like to be
a believer in the
early 19th century.
Things were sprouting up all
around you, and you could stick
your own shovel in and
it might grow roots.
It was incredible, the
outpouring of religious
expression in a new environment
of religious freedom, really
"lack of control" is
probably a better word.
No one had ever seen a
government that didn't put its
stamp on religion before.
It's important to remember in
the 1820s and 1830s, upstate New
York is in fact the
American frontier.
It is on the edge
of civilization.
It's marching forward in
farmland and development of the
Erie Canal, but still it's
the American frontier.
And this particular area becomes
known as the burned-over
district because it's fired with
evangelical fervor almost
on an annual basis.
There was such
religious fever.
But it brought around divisions
in American society, and those
divisions were reflected
in the Smith household.
The father was a Universalist,
the mother was more into
Presbyterian, and the kids
didn't quite know which way they
ought to be going and they
were struggling themselves.
NARRATOR: It was in this time
of confusion that young Joseph,
then just 14, had the first of
his visions that would become
the rock on which his
church was founded.
This is the story Smith told and
what devout Mormons
believed happened.
He is existentially gripped
by the question of
which church is right.
And so, with the insecurity that
that created in him, and the
uncertainty, he decides he needs
to find out for himself.
And he goes into this grove
of trees and he gets this
thundering, spectacular
theophany.
He describes how intense the
light was and how afraid he was,
that when it touched the trees
they would burst into flames.
He was actually scared.
And in that pillar of light
appear two persons, the
Father and the Son.
When Joseph Smith saw them,
he saw embodied beings.
He saw men the way you and I
would see men, with all the
biblical features the way Moses
said he saw them, with eyes and
ears and hands and faces.
He was blessed, I think, to
be visited by God the Father and
by his son Jesus Christ.
And in that moment he still hadi
the presence of mind to ask and
to fulfill the purpose for which
he came, which, interestingly,
wasn't to ask, "Is
there a true church?"
I've always been struck,
honestly, with the question he
posed: "Which of the
churches is true?"
And the answer was that none of
them were, and that was
an earth-shaking answer.
I'm sure it came as a
very big surprise to him.
He came from a tradition of
visionaries.
His father had dreams, his
grandfather had dreams, and so
it was nothing new for him as
well to feel that he had had
some kind of heavenly
communication.
And I think that is part of what
prepared him, but also prepared
his family to accept him as a
prophet, because before he could
test the waters of public
opinion, he had to pass
muster with his own family.
And it isn't every child that
would come before his parents
and say, "God and Christ just
visited me in a grove of trees"
and be believed. é!
NARRATOR: In the beginning,
Joseph would tell only his
family about what
happened in the grove.
Over the years, he would record
several versions of what he saw.
The first version of the
vision was written in Joseph
Smith's own hand in 1832.
It was personal; it merely dealt
with his sinfulness and his
going to the grove to ask God
for forgiveness, end of story.
Subsequently, over the next 12
years, there were other versions
that emerged from Joseph Smith
where the story got more
detailed, more colorful, and one
of the later versions became
the official version.
Finally, in 1838, we have God
the Father and the Son visiting
him, telling him to join
none of the other churches.
And it begs the question, was
Joseph building a
story as he went?
Because the story certainly
evolved and the story certainly
took on more miraculous, more
remarkable characteristics.
And he certainly became a
greater character with greater
status in God's eyes in each of
these stories, with a greater
work to do in each
of these stories.
My instinct is to attribute a
sincerity to Joseph Smith.
And yet, at the same time, as an
Evangelical Christian, I do not
believe that the members of the
Godhead really appeared to him
and told him that he should
start on a mission of, among
other things, denouncing the
kind of things that I
believe as a Presbyterian.
I can't believe that.
And yet, at the same time, I
don't I really don't believe
that he was simply making up a
story that he knew to be false
in order to manipulate people
and to gain power over a
religious movement.
And so I live with the mystery.
NARRATOR: Joseph was born
into a world where Christianity
blended seamlessly with magic.
Like other farmers in Palmyra,
Joseph and his father dug their
rocky soil in hopes
of finding golnKKvL%7
Joseph looked into magic stones
and had visions of barrels of
buried treasure and was hired to
lead others in search of gold.
Joseph's preferred method of
finding buried treasure was to
place a peep stone in a hat,
draw the hat over his face to
exclude the light, and then look
into the stone and the location
of the treasure would
be identified.
It has to be said that Joseph
Smith wasn't the only person who
was wandering around with a seer
stone looking for gold, but he
was particularly good at it, and
well known to be
particularly good at it.
And it was technically illegal,
and he was taken before
the court for this.
He was arrested and tried for
his activities and, ironically,
those in court who believed in
him, under oath, on the stand,
swore that he had this ability
to see treasure slipping away
under the earth or to see
where they were buried.
NARRATOR: When Joseph was 17,
he would later say he worried
that he had not lived
purposefully and had lost
his divine connection.
Three years had passed
since his last vision.
But one night, all of that would
change and the story he told
would become another anchor for
the Mormon faith.
He was in an upper bedroom in
his small house one night.
He says the following thing
happened: a column of light
appeared in his room literally
a column of light and then a
person came down,
very glowing person.
The person was dressed
in white, a white robe.
He say's he's the angel
He's hovering over the ground.
He's got no shoes, he's
barefooted and he says he
knew that he had no clothes
underneath his robe.
And you could see his chest.
And so he begins to tell him
the Angel Moroni to tell
Joseph about the Book of Mormon,
where it is, what it is and what
his involvement in it would be.
But he doesn't just tell him, he
shows him, to the point where
Joseph sees the locality and the
very, very location
of the golden plates.
Joseph then goes to the spot
on the hill it's not far from
where the Smith family farm was-
- and he locates the
plates there on the hill.
And the plates are under a rock,
which he had seen very
clearly in the vision.
He doesn't get to take the
plates then; he has to come back
every year for several years
until he gets the plates
late in the 1820s.
When he went to receive
them, he was married.
His wife and he
went to the hill.
He carried them down off the
He and his wife put them in the
buck board and took them home.
NARRATOR: According to
Joseph, the golden plates were
etched in ancient hieroglyphics,
and he was instructed
to translate them.
And we know that Joseph
didn't translate in the way that
a scholar would translate.
He didn't know Egyptian.
There were a couple of means
that were prepared for this.
One was, he used an instrument
that he found with the plates
that was called the
Urim and Thummim.
This is a kind of divinatory
device that goes back
into Old Testament times.
Actually, most of the
translation was done using
something called a seer stone.
He would put the stone in the
bottom of a hat presumably to
exclude surrounding light and
then he would put his
face into the hat.
It's kind of a strange
image for us.
NARRATOR: Working with his
wife and a small cadre of
friends, Joseph said he
translated the golden plates in
a creative burst over a period
of months, and then, as
instructed, returned the
plates to the angel Moroni.
The final translation was over
600 pages and would become the
Book of Mormon, one of the core
documents of a new faith.
I hear Joseph Smith's
voice every time I read it.
He was a farmer, he was
young, he was unlettered.
And he put this all together and
so you have this rough hewn kind
of text that is so beautiful in
all its imperfections because it
houses and it embodies the voice
of a real human being who had
encountered the miraculous.
I really think that Joseph
Smith, like shamans everywhere,
started out faking it I have
to believe this, that he didn't
believe this at all, that he was
out to impress but he got
caught up in the mythology
that he created.
This is what happens to shamans.
They begin to believe that they
can do these things, and then it
becomes a revelation;
they're speaking to God.
Joseph Smith had a sense of
destiny, and most
fakers don't have this.
And this is how he transformed
something that I think was
clearly made up into something
that was absolutely convincing.
NARRATOR: Every July in
Palmyra, New York, Mormons
celebrate their origins in an
extravagant pageant
on the Hill Cumorah.
An enormous cast reenacts
Joseph's discovery of the plates
that contained scriptures
of an ancient history.
Under a 40-foot golden statue of
the angel Moroni, the pageant
tells how the ancient prophet
Mormon gave the plates to his
son Moroni and how he buried
them in 400 A.D. on the very
site where the pageant
itself is unfolding.
The tablets recall the story of
Israelites who sailed from
Jerusalem about 600 B.C. and
were guided to a country that
would be one day be
known as America.
Here, these ancient Israelites
split into two races, the
Nephites and the Lamanites.
For hundreds of years, they
engaged in brutal warfare.
( explosion )
Here in America, during the
three days after his crucifixion
in Jerusalem, Christ came in his
resurrected being to preach
peace and righteousness
to these warring people.
Here, in 1827, the young Joseph
Smith would say he dug up the
tablets recording this entire
history that would become the
Book of Mormon.
The kind of revelation that
Joseph describes is the scandal
of Mormonism in the same way
that the resurrection of Christ
is the scandal of Christianity.
And what I mean by that is that
on the face of it that's an
affront to sophisticated notions
of how the universe works.
God doesn't deliver gold
plates to farm boys.
It's a cause of embarrassment to
many intellectuals in the church
to continue to insist that
Joseph had literal gold plates
given to him by a real angel.
But I also mean that it's a
scandal in the sense that it is
inseparable from the heart and
soul of Mormonism, that one
could no sooner divorce the
historical claims of the Book of
Mormon from the church then one
could divorce the story of
Christ's resurrection from
Christianity and survive
with the religion intact.
NARRATOR: For nearly two
centuries, Mormons have rooted
their faith in the truth of the
golden plates and of Joseph
Smith's original
vision in the grove.
They are the foundation of this
church, and for its leaders
there is no middle ground.
Their prophet is righteous and
he saw and talked to God.
We declare without
equivocation that God the Father
and his Son the Lord Jesus
Christ appeared in person
to the boy Joseph Smith.
When I was interviewed by Mike
Wallace on the 60 Minute
program, he asked me if I
actually believed that.
I replied, "Yes, sir, that's the
miracle of it. "
This is the way I feel about it.
Our whole strength rests on the
validity of that vision.
It either occurred or it did not
occur.
If it did not, then this work is
a fraud; if it did, then this is
the most important and wonderful
work under the heavens.
Well, I think there's no
question that the church rises
or falls on the veracity of
Joseph Smith's story.
History as theology is perilous;
if it turns out that the whole
story of Christ's resurrection
was a fabrication, then
Christianity collapses.
That's the price we pay for
believing in a God who
intervenes in human history, who
has real interactions with real
human beings in real
space and time.
That makes it historical, and
that's a reality that we just
can't flee away from.
All religion, western and
eastern, is founded
upon miracle.
It makes little sense to present
arguments against Joseph Smith
and early Mormonism that would
extend equally well to what we
are told about the origins of
what will eventually be Judaism,
the origins of Christianity, the
origins of Islam.
All religion depends
upon revelation.
All revelation is supernatural.
If you wish to be a hard rock
empiricist, then you should not
entertain any religious doctrine
whatsoever.
NARRATOR: In the early 1830s,
the burned-over district in
upstate New York was a strange
and fervent place.
Prophets roamed the countryside
in bearskins.
Annie Lee and the Shakers danced
ecstatically and
renounced all sex.
Millennial visionaries saw the
end of the world in
every fiery sunset.
The question is, how did
Mormonism distinguish itself in
such a crowded field?
There were many people who
claimed revelation from heavens,
who claimed to be prophets, who
claimed to speak with the same
kind of oracular voice.
I think the main difference in
the case of Joseph Smith was
that he had something concrete
to show for it.
It was the Book of Mormon.
It always came back to
the Book of Mormon.
NARRATOR: Its publication in
1830 was unprecedented.
At a time when most religious
manuscripts were two-page
pamphlets selling for a few
cents, Smith's book was leather-
bound and costly.
Initially, the Book of Mormon
didn't sell well, but gradually,
book by book, it was passed from
his family and his
friends to strangers.
Strange as the Book of Mormon
might appear to us, it didn't
particularly appear strange to
its converts in
the 19th century.
It's curiously American in its
own right. vN[Y%I©núÑyXO@ñ?÷"Oeç
It's frontier literature, it's
expansive, it deals with the
roiling of peoples across great
plains and the rise and fall ofÑ
civilizations.
It was religion
made in the U.S.A.
For the first time, you had a
homegrown religion, a
homegrown prophet.
It was the religion of the poor
people, and Joseph Smith came to
them and said, "You are at the
center of the drama. "
If you like, he situated the
United States within
the biblical story.
The most important function
that the Book of Mormon served
in the early church was not that
it introduced new teachings, not
that there was any particular
message or content which
revolutionized the world; it was
the mere presence of the book of
Mormon itself as an object that
was a visible, palpable object
that served to as concrete
evidence that God had opened the
heavens again.
NARRATOR: From the first hour
of its founding in April 1830 at
a farmhouse in New York, Joseph
Smith's church was
controversial.
He proclaimed his was the one
true church since the death of
Christ's apostles.
He had 40 converts by the end of
May and just as many enemies.
Neighboring newspapers denounced
the Book of Mormon as a fraud,
as blasphemous or just too
bizarre to believe.
What outraged the traditional
Christians of the day was that
this guy comes along, Joseph
Smith, and he says, "Push the
delete button on all of the
stuff you are arguing about
because we have to go back to
the very beginning and restore a
true, original, primitive
Christianity that has been
corrupted for 1,800 years, and
you're a part of the corruption.
You are the corrupters of it in
this present day.
And that God has given me a a
Newer Testament, but not only a
newer written record of what God
wants for human beings, but that
God has restored the office of
prophet, and I am the prophet
for this new age.
And I'm a prophet who is
receiving new teachings from
God. "
I think one of the hallmarks
of Joseph Smith's thought was
the collapse of the
sacred distance.
That generally is held to be an
absolutely essential ingredient
in our experience of the divine,
that sense of worshipful
distance that should obtain
between man and God.
He did this by arguing that when
revelations came to him, they
came through vehicles as
palpable and earthly as seer
stones, or Urim and Thummim, or
gold plates; that God himself
was once as we are,
that he is embodied.
That level of detail and
specificity isn't suppose to
obtain when we're talking about
things that are supposed to be
ineffable.
It was an affront to traditional
religious faith in ways that
were troubling and threatening.
NARRATOR: As much as he
aroused fury, Smith
also aroused ardor.
After he was chased out of town
in 1831, 75 people followed him
to Kirtland, Ohio.
Here he joined the preacher
Sidney Rigdon, who brought a
hundred members of his own
congregation into
Smith's church.
And later, there was another
convert, Brigham Young.
This 30-year-old carpenter,
his wife is ill, near
death and will die.
He is penniless, he is looking
for direction.
He's joined one church and left
it, joined another
church and left it.
And suddenly, when he meets
Joseph Smith, he says,
"I will follow you.
You have the answers I've been
looking for. "
So Brigham Young becomes in
microcosm what a number of
people experienced when they
listen to and talk
to Joseph Smith.
Extremely charismatic, extremely
confident, a man of the people.
He didn't talk down to people;
he spoke to them about issues
that touched their very lives.
What Joseph Smith offered
everyone who followed him
every follower, he said, had the
ability to speak
directly to God.
"God will speak to you.
He will give you inspiration.
You can have a personal
relationship with God. "
NARRATOR: Others continued to
join in great numbers.
From 1831, Smith was sending out
missionaries across America.
By 1837, the small town of
Kirtland had swollen to 3,000,
the majority of them Mormon.
In Kirtland, Joseph Smith began
calling all his followers
Latter-day Saints because he
believed they were living in the
end times with the sacred purity
of Christ's first disciples.
It was here that his theology
evolved beyond
conventional Christianity.
Smith received revelations that
reestablished the roles of the
original 12 apostles, and he
created the priesthood for all
deserving male members.
He astonished everyone by
building not a Christian church
but a temple inspired by the Old
Testament.
It would be the place for new
secret rituals of anointing and
blessing meant to connect the
Saints to God.
Mormons today still talk about
the miraculous three months when
the temple was consecrated.
We have literally hundreds of
accounts of eyewitnesses who
heard rushing of wind and heard
angelic choirs.
It was a day very much like the
Pentecost of the new testament.
People talked of seeing
angels fly in through
the windows.
They talked of seeing God stand
next to Joseph Smith.
They had what appears to be, at
times, mass hallucinations or
mass visions.
But whatever happened was
absolutely remarkable.
Joseph Smith was the Henry
Ford of revelation.
He wanted every home to have
one, and the revelation he had
in mind was the revelation he
thought he'd had,
which was seeing God.
And so, for Joseph Smith, seeing
God was what it was
to be religious.
And so, he sets about
duplicating that original
experience for everybody else.
Revelation is everything to this
It is revelation or nothing for
these people.
Kirtland is both the best of
times and the worst of times.
In 1836, there's a huge national
speculative bubble; everybody
and his brother is investing in
real estate, and it
captures Kirtland.
And in the frenzy of speculation
that develops, Joseph Smith
founds a bank, enters into all
these business enterprises, and
then the bubble bursts.
The bank collapses,
people lose money.
It's faith-shattering
in Mormon context.
People are challenging his role
as prophet, questioning
prophecies that
aren't happening.
There are stories about of
sexual improprieties, and these
will continue to grow.
And even Brigham Young says, "At
one point in Kirtland, there
were ten people who believed in
the prophet. "
And by December of 1837, some
of his closest followers wants
to take over the Kirtland
temple, pose guns and knives to
drive the other Mormons out.
I think he is also worried about
lawsuits against him.
All these debts that he's
incurred would could have
hauled him into court and kept
him there for years.
So he has to, in a
way, sneak away.
So, I think he left sort of in
despair and regret that all had
gone so wrong.
You would think he would have
become discouraged, would have
reconsidered his plans, but when
he goes to Missouri, he has not
compromised in the slightest his
desire to do the same thing all
over again to build another
city, to build another temple
and to continue
gathering the Saints.
NARRATOR: A powerful sense of
persecution has shaped
Mormon history.
Most Americans don't even know
about the dark days that haunt
Mormons still today.
Our people knew hate.
Our people knew what it was like
to be hated.
They knew what it was like to
have their children killed.
have their prophet
murdered in cold blood.
Their blood had been spread
across six states.
We are a church that has had an
extermination order
issued against us.
That is unprecedented in the
history of this
God-fearing nation.
House burning, rapings,
abuse, taking over
land and possessions.
All that was part of it, but it
was also denunciation from every
other level, from state
houses to pulpits.
"These people are not
what they should be.
They're invaders.
Get rid of them,
get rid of them. "
The hatred of Mormonism is
mysterious, it's fascinating,
it's perplexing.
Mormons were plain old white,
largely English-descended
American farmers who were God
fearing, who lived in
agricultural settlements and
wanted the best for their
children, for their wives, for
their families.
Why would they be so hated?
It has to do with the fear of
the unknown, fear of
power and hierarchy.
Did the Mormons really think for
themselves, or did Joseph Smith
think for them?
The fear of unknown personal
practices, polygamy, the fear of
unknown beliefs all of these
things made the Mormons feared.
It made Americans
worry about them.
And yet underneath there is
still something else that's hard
to get at.
There's still something else
about Mormons that seems so odd,
so peculiar, and yet it's
difficult to put a historian's
finger on what that is.
NARRATOR: From the first day,
there had been opposition
to this church.
In Missouri, it
would turn bloody.
Joseph Smith had sent
missionaries to
Independence in 1831.
Within five years, there were
5,000 Mormons in Missouri.
They had come here in the wake
of another of Smith's
early revelations.
The reason the Mormons were
in Missouri is because Joseph
Smith revealed that Missouri was
designated as the location of
Zion, this future city of God.
This is where we believe human
existence began.
More specifically, we believe
that Jackson County was the
place where Adam and Eve lived
in the Garden of Eden.
Probably more significant,
though, we believe that there
will be a place a community
established, a city that will
be here to meet the Savior.
The Savior will come here.
So I think it's in every single
Mormon's back of their mind,
Missouri is important.
When Smith announced that
Independence was the site of the
Garden of Eden and that this
would be the site of the new
Zion and that God would give
this chosen land to his new
followers, it didn't sit well
with the old settlers in Jackson
County, and many of them were
very explicit about it.
They said, "We got along fine
with the Mormons.
We had no problem with them
until Joseph Smith came along
with these revelations and told
us they were going to take all
of our land. "
NARRATOR: Tensions grew.
There were skirmishes between
the native Missourians
and the Mormons.
By the time Joseph Smith arrived
from Kirtland in 1838, the
Missourians had driven the
Mormons in forced migration from
one county to another.
They lost homes and land, many
had been tarred and feathered,
but they had also formed their
own militia.
And Joseph Smith was adamant
that the Latter-day Saints were
not Quakers who would turn the
other cheek and avoid violence.
They would pick up arms, they
would defend themselves.
NARRATOR: The
Mormons retaliated.
They drove Missourians off their
land and burned their homes.
It had become a war.
The stage was set for an even
greater violence in a Mormon
village called Haun's Mill.
October 30, 1838, dawned as a
beautiful day.
It was clear, the wind was calm
and Indian summer temperatures.
My third grade grandfather,
Austin Hammer, and a great
uncle, Jon Yorke, were there on
guard duty to defend the mill.
A group of up to 200 or 300
horsemen rode into the village
of Haun's Mill.
The women grabbed the children
and ran for the woods.
The men made for the
blacksmith shop.
That's where the
arms were stored.
The mob quickly surrounded the
blacksmith shop, and because the
logs hadn't been chinked, they
were able to stick their muskets
through the gaps in the logs.
Mobbers are poking their guns
through the opening between logs
and just shooting
anything that moves.
It's like shooting
fish in a barrel.
NARRATOR: As the raiding
party rode off, they left 17
Mormons dead, 13 wounded.
One old man had been hacked to
death by a corn cutter and a boy
of ten had been shot
at point blank range.
None of the killers
was ever arrested.
It wasn't until I was a
senior in college that I
realized that I had ancestors
who were actually
there at Haun's Mill.
And I went to the church
historical department and I did
some digging around and actually
found an account written by a
great, great, great aunt of mine
who was a young girl at the
And she had described both the
event and its aftermath in vivid
detail many years
after the fact.
When word came that the massacre
had been accomplished and the
mobbers had left, they came back
into the village.
And here it was many, many, many
years later.
She's remembering that day, as a
young girl of nine, being taken
by her mother into this center
of the village and seeing this
scene of just carnage
and devastation.
But the one image that seemed to
stand out in her mind decades
and decades later was the sound
of the bodies as they placed
them on a door and
slid them into a well.
I've often wondered of the of
the horror that that sound must
have held for that young girl,
who apparently remembered it for
the rest of her life.
NARRATOR: Governor Lilburn
Boggs of Missouri took a
dramatic stand to
end the violence.
For the first and only time in
American history, a state
government issued an
extermination order.
"The Mormons must be treated
like enemies," it read, "and
must be exterminated or driven
from the state for
the public peace. "
The Mormons were forced to
surrender their land and
possessions and to be out of
Missouri by Spring.
Mormons have a very complex
relationship with their own
sense of persecution.
It is unfair to say that they
courted persecution.
On the other hand, it is fair to
say that it brought them
exhilaration and conviction that
what they were doing was the
right thing because God's
prophets have never been welcome
in their own lands.
Persecution both identified them
as special and seared into them
the pain of what being a
peculiar people means.
The journey from Missouri to
Illinois for another new
beginning is one of the darkest
days of Joseph
Smith's existence.
And at that time, he turns to
Brigham Young, calls him to
organize the people and make an
orderly exodus.
And this is a recurring theme
for the Latter-day Saint people:
persecution, exodus.
And they believe they've reached
the promise land when they
arrive at the banks of the
Mississippi river in
Nauvoo, Illinois.
NARRATOR: When the Mormons
arrived in Illinois in 1839,
they had become a
national story.
People in Illinois were shocked
by press accounts of the Haun's
Mill atrocity and
welcomed the refugees.
Joseph Smith bought 18,000 acres
that became the Saints' new
gathering place, Nauvoo their
own city where they could create
a perfect society in preparation
for Christ's return.
Missouri survivors, alongside
new European converts, worked in
a communal economy to build
homes and factories.
By 1844, Nauvoo's population had
swollen to 12,000, rivaling the
size of Chicago.
Nauvoo becomes the apex, the
peak of Joseph Smith's career.
He's eminently successful.
He's achieved everything that he
set out to do.
He's created a dynamic,
beautiful city.
And to many, this is the
happiest days of the early
church, and he's engaged in the
most remarkable and innovative
stages of his prophetic career.
In Nauvoo, suddenly there's a
rush of new revelations, two of
the key ones.
Baptism for the dead Joseph
Smith reveals that it's been
presented to him that Latter-day
Saints can baptize dead members
to bring them into their family
to ensure life everlasting
together in the great beyond,
beyond the veil.
The second principle revealed
celestial marriage.
That consistent with
teachings in the Old Testament,
that certain special individuals
are called to practice plural
marriage, what we call polygamy
sometimes much to his wife,
Emma Smith's, great
disappointment.
NARRATOR: And the
disappointment and anger of many
of his followers when they
discover that Smith and other
leaders had been secretly
engaging in plural marriage.
Joseph Smith had launched
himself on a path of self
destruction, obsessed with
building his military
and political power.
He had the Nauvoo city charter
written so that he could assume
even greater authority.
He was elected mayor, he had
himself appointed chief justice
of the city court and lieutenant
general of the Nauvoo Legion.
Nauvoo had become a perfect
theocracy, and their neighbors
increasingly saw the Mormon's
dominance as a threat.
There are these fabulous
pictures of Smith holding his
sword out, and that's a very
martial picture.
So that you combine religion,
military force, political power,
and you've got something that
looks like a country, a whole
new identity within the United
States' borders.
In the early 1840s, he
decides, "I will run for
president of the United States. "
This is appalling to many
people, that here is a person
coming from this unique,
theological, unusual
anthropomorphically other group,
and he's going to run for
president of the United States?
Add onto that the political
dominance of Mormons in that
area, the economic dominance of
the Mormons in that area, the
control of commerce of the
Mormons in that area, and the
violence starts to
flare on the fringes.
And Joseph Smith knows that it's
coming to an absolute showdown.
One more spark is all it will
take to bring all the forces on
earth against him.
He knows this.
The spark is found in the Nauvoo
Expositor.
NARRATOR: The Nauvoo
Expositor was a newspaper
published by William Law, once a
close associate of Joseph Smith
who had broken with the
prophet over plural marriage.
The Expositor, in its first and
only issue, exposed Smith's
secret practice of polygamy,
charging him with coercing young
women and assuming
dictatorial political power.
He would call some of them
lies, but other of them were
truths that he did not want to
be trafficked in
the public press.
He reacts in a rage.
He orders its destruction.
The destruction of an American
printing press in the eyes of
the public at that time
is a horrific act.
It's antithetical to the
American experience.
NARRATOR: The people in the
surrounding counties who had
welcomed the Mormons now
wanted to get rid of them.
Prominent citizens called for
Smith's death and would later
become part of the
mob that killed him.
He stands alone.
He stands charged.
He has an opportunity to flee,
and it's one of the most
interesting moments in the
history of the
Latter-day Saints.
He has the moment to flee.
He starts to, and, by various
interpretations, for one reason
or another, he turns the horse
and comes back to face arrest,
which means being imprisoned in
the Carthage Jail, which means
death at the hands of
a mob within days.
NARRATOR: Smith was
imprisoned on charges of
treason.
Although the Governor of
Illinois had promised his
protection, just two days later,
a mob of 200 non-Mormon men,
their faces painted
black, rushed the jail.
They storm up the stairs.
Smith and his brother and
friends put up a stout defense.
Joseph is hit
repeatedly at the window.
He fell through the window,
calling to God, and was dead
within moments of striking the
ground.
NARRATOR: There were those
who hoped that Joseph's death
would be the end of Mormonism,
but he was, in his own words, a
rough stone rolling, and in
death, as in life, he would
shatter expectations.
The flawed Joseph, the man,
left enduring controversies.
He seemed to thrive in
opposition, leaving the Mormons
in conflict with their neighbors
and in exile from the rest of
But the prophet Joseph had given
his people a new set of
doctrines and rituals that
became a powerful faith that at
its heart claimed that all
righteous men could become gods.
For his followers, Mormonism was
the American dream writ large.
But he had set them on a path
that would prove to be both
exhilarating and dangerous.
Imagine if you are walking
the streets of Nauvoo in the
days after the murder
of Joseph Smith.
You have pure chaos promises
of different leadership, others
starting to lay claim to the
mantle of authority to lead
this religious following.
The mobs that are anti-Mormon
are gathering on the
outskirts of the city.
NARRATOR: The Church was
hanging by a thread; its members
were splitting up into
contentious groups.
Some dissenters wanted to return
to a Mormonism without polygamy
and the temple rites and
threatened to break away.
Brigham Young arrives and in
very short order commands the
attention of the Mormons and
also earns their confidence.
Brigham Young brings order and a
sense of purpose to
the chaos of Nauvoo.
NARRATOR: But the pressure on
the Mormons was building.
The Illinois legislature had
revoked the Nauvoo city charter
and a governor's commission
told the Mormons to leave.
Brigham's sense is Illinois
has abandoned us, the United
States of America has abandoned
us; we will leave
the United States.
He knows they're going westward;
there is no other option.
They dare not turn back to the
east; there's no
deliverance there.
NARRATOR: Young thought he
had found the Mormons a new home
outside of America in maps of
the valley of the Great Salt
Lake, which was then
part of Mexico.
But many refused to go,
including Joseph
Smith's widow, Emma.
Her followers, led by her son,
would ultimately become the
Reorganized Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But the remaining Saints, the
majority of them,
left with Young.
They set out in the middle of
winter, and very shortly after
they began the evacuation
the river freezes.
They spend three months
struggling through the mud
and the sleet and the snow.
They lose a lot of people.
It's a time of
immense suffering.
NARRATOR: In 1846, Brigham
Young led the first group of
what would become over 3,000
Mormons westward
out of Illinois.
It was one of the largest mass
migrations in the history of
When they got to Nebraska, he
organized Winter Quarters, a
temporary way station where each
successive wave of immigrants
would plant crops, rest and
replenish themselves for
the arduous journey ahead.
For all of Brigham Young's
great organizational skills, he
appears to be tormented
at times by self-doubt.
"How can I assume the
mantle of Joseph?
How can I become a prophet like
Joseph Smith, because unlike
Joseph, God doesn't speak to me. "
In February of 1847, in the
midst of very, very tough times
at Winter Quarters,
he falls ill.
And in the midst of this
sickness, he has a dream.
He finds himself in a room with
Joseph Smith, an the light is
streaming in through an open
window and Smith has his
feet up on the table.
And Brigham Young says to him,
"How can I be a prophet?"
And Joseph Smith says to him,
"Listen to the still, small
voice.
If you listen for God's
inspiration, He will
always direct you. "
And when Brigham Young wakes
up, he is transformed.
After that, this second guessing
and this hesitation is gone.
From that moment in February
1847 at Winter Quarters, Brigham
Young assumes the
mantle of Joseph.
With every myth, there
is a central truth.
And the great myth of the Mormon
exodus to the west is how
heroic the effort was.
They could not turn back.
They could only go forward, and
all they had was this sense of
faith that somehow they would be
delivered at the other end.
They didn't have enough wagons,
they didn't have enough horses,
so at various times they
would use pull carts.
This is 1,000 miles of pulling a
cart along a very rough, rutted
trail, all on a sense of faith.
Fathers dropping dead, leaving
their wives and young children
to be scooped up by the
succeeding wave of Mormons
heading to the west.
They start too late
on certain journeys.
They're trapped by Wyoming
blizzards as they move
across the plains.
Death by the dozens is typical.
Death in the hundreds on
occasion, all on this purpose
of going to a deliverance.
It was a pilgrimage of the
most foundational and
fundamental kind that forged a
people.
And today, people within the
faith reenact the trek and
connect with this sacred
history.
They envision themselves as
Saints walking to Zion, walking
to their own salvation.
It's an incredibly
powerful story.
When I realized that seven of
my eight great, great
grandmothers walked all or part
of that trail, I knew that
that's where my journey
had to start, too.
What I was searching for out on
the trail was the kind of faith
that sent my great, great
grandmother Hannah Middleton
Hawkey from England, over the
ocean, then by train to the edge
of what was then the edge of the
United States, to the middle of
the country, where she was
dumped, expected to build her
own handcart and then pull her
belongings and walk with that
handcart and her three children
across the United States
to the Salt Lake Valley.
When she was asked in later
years, was she sorry for that?
She had lost her son.
She buried him along the way.
Was she sorry she
made that decision?
Was there ever doubt?
She said no, there was never
doubt anywhere along the way.
She felt relieved
when her son died.
He died of starvation,
exhaustion and cold.
She was relieved when he died.
She came through with her two
young daughters.
She didn't walk
again for a year.
I could never arrive at that
certainty, and that's the reason
I choose not to practiceÑ&7wKoI
But I still practice faith, but
it's a different kind of faith.
I think it's based
in uncertainty.
One observer visited the
Saints on the prairie.
He said it was one of those
haunting, haunting experiences,
to see the vast stretches of
isolation and loneliness, and
then you'd hear the soft strains
of classical music coming over
the hills, and there would be
the Saints gathered around,
playing music and dancing.
The philosopher Nietzsche once
wrote, "I should never believe
in a God who would not know how
to dance. "
And I feel the same way.
There is, in the Mormon faith, a
kind of celebration of the
physical, which I think is a
little bit outside the
Christian mainstream.
When the Saints moved west to
Utah, one observer in the 1850s
noted that they had schools in
most every block, but that every
night, the schools were
converted into dancing schools.
And he observed with some
displeasure that Mormons taught
their children that they should
go to school, but they
must go to dancing school.
And I think that there's a
connection between the place of
dancing in Mormon history and
the concept of an embodied God.
Because we believe that God the
Father, as well as Jesus Christ,
are physical, embodied beings,
that elevates the body
to a heavenly status.
And I think there's a kind of
exuberance and celebration that
is in many ways a result of that
same collapse of sacred distance
that was so central to
Joseph Smith's thinking.
Instead of denigrating the
things of the body in order to
elevate the things of the
spirit, Joseph always argued
that it was the successful
incorporation of both that
culminated in a fullness of joy.
And so dancing, I think, is in
many ways just an emblem or a
symbol of a kind of righteous
reveling in the physical
tabernacle that we believe is a
stage on our way to
godliness itself.
NARRATOR: On July 24, 1847,
more than a year after they left
Nauvoo, and after years of
persecution and forced
migrations when thousands had
lost their lives and property,
Brigham Young and the first
contingent of Mormons finally
reached the valley of
the Great Salt Lake.
When the Latter-day Saints
arrive in 1847, this is still
technically Mexican territory.
No one in their right mind would
choose to settle in the Great
Basin.
In Brigham's eyes, he
looked and he saw a desert.
This is the right place.
Drive on.
It is one of those very rare
moments where people literally
are gathered around Brigham and
saying, "Are you serious?
I have been in that wagon for 60
days.
I'd gladly do another 60 just to
get to a better place than this.
This can't be the place. "
Why here?
Because it was the land
no one else wanted.
Brigham knew what he wanted.
He wanted the turf for an
isolated people to build up the
Kingdom of God on Earth,
and do it on their terms.
The fact that it was off
the beaten path, fine.
The fact that it was going to be
tough and rugged and hard
to make a go, even better.
It will bring us
closer together.
We'll be more dependent
upon each other.
There's a good reason why
historians refer to this as
exodus much like Moses leading
the Jews out of Egypt because
this was, in its own way, a
miraculous trip in which the
Mormon faithful walked away from
the rest of the country and in
many senses walked out of
secular time and
into sacred time.
With each step they walked
further and further away from
the rest of the world and deeper
and deeper into their faith,
gathering in Zion, building up
the kingdom of God and creating
something that the rest of
the world had never seen.
I will never forget spending
a night in the Mountain Meadows.
To be there, and for me, to walk
what was a killing field, the
last day on earth of men, women,
and children I was a young
father at the time and I
realized that children that were
the age of my own children
died in that location.
And nighttime is the cruelest
time in Mountain Meadows.
The wind blows across
me, and it chills me.
It touches you in a
unique and profound way.
There's nothing else in
Mormon history like the
Mountain Meadows Massacre.
It presents a huge challenge, an
enormous difficulty, to
believing Latter-day Saints.
And for any historian, it's a
horrific, troubling event.
And for me, the key question is,
how did these decent, religious
men who had sacrificed so much
for what they believed in, how
did they become mass murderers?
By any standards, what
they did was horrific.
It's white people killing white
people's babies and white people
killing unarmed white women.
And then you have a religious
people who are doing this.
You expect religious people to
act differently than
you do soldiers.
All of that goes into making
Mountain Meadows the horror
that it was and is to us.
To understand what set
the stage for this almost
incomprehensible act of
violence, you have to take
yourself to a different world,
to a different time and
different place: Utah Territory,
the mid 1850s.
NARRATOR: For the Mormons,
the first years in
Utah were difficult.
A terrible drought
hit the entire West.
People were pushed to the
verge of starvation.
But slowly the
situation improved.
Brigham's idea to colonize,
to send people out and establish
supporting communities,
starts to come to life.
Immigrants are arriving,
repopulating the Salt Lake
Valley and then being dispatched
with great order and sense of
purpose to far flung areas to
begin new agricultural projects.
And rather than view it as the
good times, Brigham
is deeply troubled.
The ardor of the
faith starts to ebb.
The sense of commitment, in the
eyes of Brigham Young, begins to
disappoint and in 1853 Brigham
says, "That is enough. "
It's ultimately known
as the Reformation.
People were called to reform
and repent and to step up to the
mark and practice the old
time religion of Mormonism.
The religious leaders were
engaged in an orgy of fanatical
rhetoric and warning people of
the price they would pay, up to
the point of their very lives,
should they did not
live righteously.
The Mormons in the 19th
century really believed
that the end was nigh.
And you could believe that this
was really a land that was ripe
for that transformation, that
you were already half
there, to the resurrection.
It was as though the earth
was already on fire.
You were living in fire red,
orange, yellow, fiery
land and rocks.
Red, it's like blood red.
And when the wind blows, it
creates a kind of an excess,
a zealotry.
I think the very land itself
infused people with a sense
almost of doom that
the end was nigh.
NARRATOR: The Mormons had
come west to escape America, but
within a year of arriving, they
found themselves suddenly part
of the United States again.
The settlement of the Mexican
War had given the United States
government sovereignty over
Utah.
Although Brigham Young was
appointed governor of the new
territory, he was forced to
accept outside federal officials
in his administration, and he
bristled at their challenge to
his absolute rule
over the Mormons.
They send a petition signed
by thousands of people from Utah
saying that they will no longer
obey any laws of Congress
that they don't like.
They run out virtually every
non-Mormon federal official in
the territory and it appears
that Brigham Young is
deliberately trying to provoke a
reaction from the
national government.
This plays out against the
backdrop of the American Union
itself tearing apart.
The South is making continual
sounds towards secession, the
issue of slavery and states'
rights, and the person that's
dealing with it is a president
by the name of James Buchanan.
Buchanan declares the Utah
Territory in rebellion, and he
marches 20% of the entire United
States Army to the West
to subdue the rebellion.
They really believed, the
Mormons, that their
lives were in peril.
This is a culture that had
experienced persecution in
Missouri, in Illinois.
Their prophet had been murdered.
They understood what it was
to literally be at war.
They believed they
could be exterminated.
Under such conditions, it
doesn't excuse what happened,
but it helps us understand the
extremely heated,
supercharged atmosphere.
NARRATOR: As the United
States Army moved towards Utah
in the summer of 1857, the
Mormons learned that a wagon
train from Arkansas was heading
west on a trail through the
southern part of the territory.
They are led by a man
by the name of Fancher.
At the same time as they are
loading their wagons to head
out, one of the most beloved
members of the L.D.S. Church is
murdered in Arkansas
while on a mission.
This is an extraordinary
confluence of events
reformation, a beloved figure
murdered in Arkansas, the Army
is marching, and here comes a
wagon party from Arkansas on the
trail.
The Mormons are aware that
the Army is marching.
Brigham declares martial
law, trade with no one.
And then word spreads that
they're from Arkansas, even
some with Missouri roots.
And the Mormons say, "Missouri
the massacre at Haun's Mill. "
NARRATOR: As the Arkansas
wagon train approached the town
of Cedar City in southern Utah,
local Mormon militia leaders,
including Major John D.
Lee, were on high alert.
In Salt Lake City, Governor
Brigham Young had promised the
federal government he would
protect immigrants
passing through Utah.
But he had also told local
Native American leaders that
they now had his permission to
steal cattle from
these wagon trains.
It was a new policy.
"We'll allow the Indians to take
the cattle, which will teach the
government a lesson that we
can't control the Indians. "
And so the Cedar City leaders
decided to take some cattle,
using the Indians, and, "by the
way, if some of those bad guys
are killed, we won't be sorry. "
The Fancher party arrived at
Cedar City, according to the
Mormon journals, on the
fourth of September.
All our best evidence is that
they make it to Mountain Meadows
by Sunday evening, September 6.
And they pull in to this
beautiful alpine valley, and
felt that they were safe.
On Monday morning, September 7,
the wagon train is
just starting to stir.
They started getting coffee
and getting breakfast, and
people starting to get around.
Then all of a sudden, in the
distance, you hear crack, or
boom.
And it began.
They're trying to circle those
wagons, and eventually
get dug in.
At first, they think
it's by Indians.
And then there's some doubts.
But it appears that Mormon
militiamen launched the attack
with the support
of some Paiutes.
And it seems like they use the
Paiutes as shock troops.
It then settled
down into a siege.
Lee had to send to the
settlements to get more and more
men out and the Arkansans
are fighting back hard.
But the turning point was,
for John D. Lee, "They saw me
there, they knew I was there,
they knew Mormons were involved
and we can't let them
tell that story. "
We know that there was a
council meeting in Cedar City at
which the military commanders
decided that every adult who
could testify or bear
witness would have to die.
After a couple of days, a
white flag appears on the
horizon, and a man walks
out, and he's white.
And he says, "I'm from one of
the local communities, and we've
talked with the Native
American tribes.
If you put down your weapons,
leave your goods behind, we've
negotiated that you can leave
this field and your safe
passage is guaranteed. "
The wounded are
put into a wagon.
The youngest children
are put into a wagon.
Then the older children walk.
The women walk.
The men walk.
They get about a quarter mile
outside of the encirclement.
Someone believes
they see a signal.
Each Mormon walking along
with our men, wheeled around
suddenly and shot the man next
to him, killing most
of them n the spot.
I was one of those children.
At the time of the massacre, I
wasn't quite three years old,
but even when you're that
young, you don't forget the
horror of having your father
gasp for breath and go limp,
when you have your arms around
his neck, screaming with terror.
You don't forget the screaming
of other children, and the
agonized shrieks of women beig
hacked to death.
And you wouldn't forget it,
either, if you saw your own
mother topple over in the wagn
beside you, with a big red
splotch getting bigger and
bigger on the front
of her calico dress.
Sarah Baker Mitchell.
The wounded have been shot in
the wagons as well.
The women, the children.
The youngest children disappear
and are secreted off and are
taken in by Mormon households in
the nearby communities.
The bodies are left in place.
NARRATOR: When the massacre
was over, at least 120 men,
women and children
were murdered.
The Mormons had spared 17
children because they believed
the souls of those under the age
of eight were not fully formed
and still innocent.
John D. Lee would write years
later that from the day the
Fancher party was slaughtered on
the field, there was a vow of
silence, and that the person who
broke that vow would pay for it
with their lives.
The problem with trying to
tell the story of Mountain
Meadows the sources
are all fouled up.
You have either got to rely on
the testimony of the murderers
or of the surviving children.
And so what we know about the
actual massacre is could be
challenged on almost any point.
But what we do know is the
cover-up, and the cover-up can
be very clearly documented and
it is not ambiguous.
It is absolutely clear that this
event was purposely distorted
and misrepresented and hidden.
NARRATOR: Denials from the
church began immediately.
They sent letters to Mormon
authorities outside Utah saying
the Paiute Indians had done it
and passed reports to Washington
repeating this falsehood.
The church's claims were
countered with days.
In 1858, a report on the front
page of the New York Times
identified John D. Lee as the
instigator of the massacre.
My great great grandfather
was John D. Lee, who was the
only one brought to trial and
convicted for this, in which
there was complicity of at
least at least five other
leaders, I think, as you read
the history, that should have
been in that trial.
Brigham Young, who was his
adopted father, did not support
him in the trial.
He did not come in and say,
"Let's find these other guys.
It isn't only John D.
Lee's fault here. "
Ultimately, he's executed,
ironically, in the
Mountain Meadows.
Lee goes to his death
protesting, not necessarily his
innocence, but "not the role
that I am being set up for. "
The people who participated
in the massacre that day, the 75
or 100 men who were involved
I think I became more
sympathetic to their plight
because of this idea, this
Mormon principle, of
perfect obedience.
These men were ordered to appear
at Mountain Meadows.
So, in a way, they were victims
of their own devotion and
And if you can get people to
believe that they are doing
God's will, you can get them to
do anything.
NARRATOR: One of the most
elusive and enduring questions
is who gave the order?
Was it local militia leaders?
Or had it come from the highest
authority, from Brigham Young?
After having studied this for
a decade and having looked at it
in great detail, I'm convinced
that this was done explicitly at
Brigham Young's orders.
Nothing happened in Utah
Territory that Brigham Young
didn't know about.
It was a an act of vengeance.
It was a political act to
demonstrate that the Mormons
controlled the overland road,
and it was ordered
from the very top.
As I explored the sources, I
felt relieved at what I'd found.
I felt comforted that Brigham
Young did what he thought was
best in his Utah war policy.
But his own personality and his
own flamboyant rhetoric caused
him to go beyond where he should
have gone.
His mistake was to stir up some
emotions which got
out of control.
But he didn't order it then, and
he didn't condone it.
Shortly before the events
took place on September 11,
1857, the day of the massacre,
Brigham Young called a number of
Indian tribal leaders
to Salt Lake City.
And in that meeting, Dimick
Huntington was there actually
taking notes, and in his diary
we have an account of Brigham
Young actually instructing the
tribal leaders, telling them
that they essentially may have
all of the wagon trains on a
certain route.
The Mormons were
preparing for war.
In a way, it was Brigham Young
saying, "Go ahead
and have at it. "
We have very little evidence of
any involvement of Brigham Young
in the Mountain Meadows
Massacre, but we do have this
one indication in my great great
grandfather's diary saying that,
at least, Brigham Young set the
stage for certain
events to take place.
Over 150 years later people
still argue over the ghosts of
Mountain Meadows.
Who pulled the trigger?
Who gave the order?
Will it ever be resolved?
I have no doubt, on the basis
of what I have studied and
learned, that Mormons
including local leaders of our
church were prime movers in
that terrible episode and
participated in the killing.
And what a terrible thing to
contemplate, that the barbarity
of the frontier and the
conditions of the Utah war and
whatever provocations were
perceived to have been given,
would have led to such an
extreme episode, such an extreme
atrocity perpetrated by members
of my faith.
I pray that the Lord will
comfort those that are still
bereaved by it, and I pray that
He can find a way to forgive
those who took such a terrible
action against their
fellow beings.
Mountain Meadows may be that
moment when you can look and
say, "This is where Mormonism's
own checks and balances failed
them, and they lost control, and
they burned to the ground. "
This fire, this sense of being
God's anointed, of speaking in
the name of God, having a work
to do, being above the law,
Mountain Meadows may be the
symbol of that.
And until Mormonism itself comes
to terms with Mountain Meadows
and how that happened, it will
remain alive for them as well.
My grandfather lived plural
marriage, and he went to prison
in the 1880s, and served his
time there for living
plural marriage.
My mother had told me that
Grandpa was really a good man,
because of the things that they
had suffered and the persecution
they had to go through, all for
the religion.
"As I was going up the
stairs, I met a man
who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish, he
would go away. "
That symbolizes the church and
plural marriage.
People still rush to judgment,
believing that Utah is
synonymous with plural marriage,
and that somehow that connection
still extends to the
contemporary Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Every ten years, the United
States rediscovers the
polygamists, purporting to be
Mormon fundamentalists, still
believing in plural marriage.
And then it goes away.
And then ten years later, it
comes back again, and so they
get featured on
national television.
Every time it comes out, the
Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints flinches,
knowing that there's going to be
housewife in Illinois or a
banker in Atlanta or a clergyman
in upstate New York who's going
to look at that and say, "Aha,
polygamy, Mormons, Utah, I knew
I wish to state
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whatever to do with those
practicing polygamy.
They are not members of this
Most of them have
never been members.
They're in violation
of the civil law.
They know they are in violation
of the law.
They are subject
to its penalties.
The Church, of course, has no
jurisdiction whatever
in this matter.
If any of our members are found
to be practicing plural
marriage, they are
excommunicated, the most serious
penalty the Church can impose.
There is a disconnect, and
it's a powerful disconnect.
The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints embraces the
totality of its history, because
it speaks to the roots of the
Mormon experience. á@qr[
That history is central to
telling that story.
But the bumps in the road,
particularly plural marriage,
are aspects of the story they
are not comfortable
dealing with.
They wish that man would go
NARRATOR: The origins of
polygamy are unclear.
What we do know is that in
Nauvoo in the summer of 1843, in
his office above the general
store, Joseph Smith dictated the
revelation authorizing polygamy.
In his revelation Smith claimed
that God had commanded his
people to live in plural
marriages, and by doing so they
would progress to the highest
level of heaven as gods.
Though the revelation on
polygamy was given during the
Nauvoo period in the 1840s, we
know that he was talking about
the practice of polygamy in
scriptural terms as early as
1831 and 1832.
He had an affair, or if you want
to call it, a marriage, during
the Kirtland period to a 19-
year-old girl who served as a
maid in the Smith home.
Joseph Smith begins seriously
to take plural wives,
in rapid order.
Maybe 30 wives in total, ten of
them married to other men.
There was pressure
put on these women.
They were told that this was the
Lord's will, and he was the
Lord's prophet, and that if they
were to please God,
they had to comply.
Joseph tended to couch it in
terms of the blessings that
would come not only to them but
to their whole family, that they
would all be blessed by being
sealed together in this
relationship with the prophet.
It led to all sorts
of problems for him.
It tried the souls of even the
faithful members, and, of
course, it led to great
alienation of his own wife Emma.
The question arises, did
Smith lie to his wife?
Probably so, but we don't have
enough of the dialog to know
exactly what went on between
Smith and his wife.
We do know that he had marriages
that she didn't know about, and
that they were with women who
lived under her roof, and they
were with her friends.
And that, of course, is a
nightmare for anyone.
In his own mind he believed
that Abraham and the other
prophets in the Old Testament
were directed by God to practice
polygamy, and so I think he used
that, and I think in his own
mind he became convinced that if
God had allowed them to do it,
God would permit
Joseph Smith to do it.
But for me, as I studied the
issue, I came to the conclusion
that his sexual desire drove the
practice and that he found a way
to sanctify it, to make it
respectable, and to couch it in
scriptural terms with
revelations of convenience.
When I started finding out
some of the things that Joseph:ó
Smith actually did and said, I
think he was struggling with
trying to bring together
spirituality and sexuality.
And quite frankly, Christianity
has been really bad at this, and
most major religions have been
really bad at spirituality and
sexuality.
You're supposed to be spiritual
on Sunday, sexual when you're in
bed with your partner your
legal husband or wife, right, no
one else and yet you're
supposed to deny your sexuality
in all of these other contexts.
Well, it doesn't make sense.
Do I think Smith's
revelations on polygamy can be
reduced to his sex drive?
No, I don't, anymore than I
think the Book of Mormon can be
reduced to treasure hunting.
It's too simplistic.
We all know this.
There are so many easier ways to
satisfy our sex drive than to
have many marriages,
at least at one time.
Now, maybe serially, but having
many marriages at one time seems
to me to be the least rational
way to satisfy one's sex drive.
Joseph Smith turns to Brigham
Young, and said, "Brigham, you
are being called to enter into
this practice. "
And Brigham's initial
reaction is, "No.
No, I cannot.
Ask me to do anything.
Ask me to sacrifice my
wealth, my fortune.
Ask me to be away
from my family.
But don't ask me to do this. "
Joseph Smith continually
reintroduces the subject month
after month after month, and
finally Brigham Young is
watching a funeral pass down the
main street of Nauvoo, and he
finally acknowledges, "I will
accept this principle, and it's
the first time in my life that I
desire the grave.
I wish I were dead rather than
have to do this. "
But Brigham Young, once
committed, all the way in.
And soon Brigham Young is noting
in his diary, in his journal,
"M.E.," married for eternity,
page after page after page.
NARRATOR: Young would
officially marry more than 50
Many of those were widows and
elderly women whom he cared for
economically.
And not all the women lived with
him as man and wife.
Those who did would bear him 57
children.
When the Mormons were driven
off of Nauvoo and started to
head to the west, they packed
polygamy in their wagons, and
they carried this principle into
the frontier of the
American West.
They felt if they were free of
the United States they could
practice this aspect of their
religion as revealed by Joseph
NARRATOR: Plural marriage
would never be widely practiced
by the rank and file of the
Overall, 20% to 30% of the
Saints were polygamists, most of
them from the leadership who
could afford it.
The perceived notion is that
polygamy was a wonderful thing,
that it was the divine
principle, and that the people
who could live it were living a
higher order.
The reality, I think, is that it
was so full of heartbreak, just
heart-wrenching moments and
events when a husband came home
and said to his wife, "Emma, the
Bishop has said that I have to
take another wife, and I have my
eye on Prudence.
She is 16 years old.
Prudence Karchner,
and you know her.
We've grown up with her in the
community, and the Bishop has
said that I'm to take
her for a wife. "
And this is exactly what
happened to my
great grandfather.
And I have his wife's diary.
She was devastated.
She was she was just
couldn't believe that that
this man, with whom she had
several children and had a
wonderful life, that she was now
going to have to share him with
a 16-year-old girl.
She was 30.
That 16-year-old girl was my
great grandmother.
And it took a few days of going
out for walks at
night and talking.
And then everybody adjusted to
the idea, "Yes, we are going to
have another wife. "
And it isn't, "I'm going to have
another wife," but "We're going
to have another wife. "
They really did try and make it
work, because they again, the
idea of perfect obedience.
You simply can't say,
"I won't do this. "
You can't say that and still be
a good Mormon.
NARRATOR: In 1852 the Mormons
ended the secrecy, publicly
announced they were practicing
plural marriage and began to
preach it from the pulpit.
In Victorian America, editorials
raged against imagined harems
and concubines in Utah.
Protestant ministers denounced
the practice and the outrage
spread through sensational
popular novels.
And the stories included
women beaten within an inch of
their lives, locked in cellars,
escaping across the desert.
It's the stuff of great drama.
Many of them depicted Mormons
as a kind of white slavers who
would raid caravans or wagon
trains in order to secure brides
for the harem of Brigham or
other high-profile
church leaders.
In Senate testimony in the 19th
century, it was alleged that
Mormons were actually offering
human sacrifice on the altars of
the Salt Lake Temple.
Many anti-polygamists thought
that Mormon polygamy was nothing
more than a fraud.
They thought these priests had
delegated themselves with sexual
opportunities that they denied
to the rest of the men in their
own society and that they had
denied women their own natural
inclination to monogamy.
The Mormon defenders of polygamy
met anti-polygamists on their
own turf and fought it out.
They said, "You bet marriage
makes a difference.
Take a look at your own
societies and the prostitutes
and the abandoned women that are
And look at our society, and see
every woman have the opportunity
to be married to a man who not
only will marry her but is an
upstanding member of the faith. "
NARRATOR: But the Mormons
would pay a high price
politically for their
embrace of polygamy.
For 47 years Utah was denied
admission as a state.
The United States government
insisted that the Mormon church
must completely renounce
Polygamy was always the
easiest whipping boy for federal
officials who really feared
something else.
And what they feared was
theocracy in Utah, the union of
church and state, where the
people of Utah territory would
adhere more closely to religious
leadership than elected
leadership.
The democratic process meant
nothing to them.
NARRATOR: Brigham Young
passionately defended plural
marriage until his
death in 1877.
50,000 people came from across
the country to view his simple
coffin, wreathed in white wool
and to pay their respects to the
leader who they felt had saved
the church and made Joseph
Smith's vision a reality.
His successors continued the
struggle and the U.S. government
declared polygamy a felony and
began to imprison hundreds of
And when the Utah territorial
prison filled up, and the Idaho
territorial prison filled up,
and the Arizona territorial
prison filled up, they began
sending them east to Nebraska
and even to Detroit.
They were being convicted
by the hundreds.
And so men had to
often hide out.
When we focus only on the
suffering imposed on families
whose husbands went to jail,
we're not really taking a look
at the big picture to the extent
that there was a simple story of
innocent, separatist, utopian
existence stomped on without
provocation by the rest of the
country, then I think we have
missed the really interesting
part of 19th century Mormonism,
which is that they claimed a
separate political life and the
power to control those within
their borders, and the ability
to keep the rest of the world
out of that control.
Congress comes after the
Mormon people in the Utah
territory with every weapon at
their disposal.
In 1887, they pass the Edmonds-
Tucker Act.
No longer is it aimed at the
individual; now we will target
the Church itself.
We will seek to prohibit
immigration of people to the
United States who are Mormon.
We will disfranchise members of
the Mormon church.
They will not be allowed to sit
on juries, they will not have
the right to hold office, they
will not have the right to vote,
and we will seize the property
of the Mormon church.
NARRATOR: In 1890, under
enormous pressure, the new
leader, Prophet Wilford
Woodruff, issued a manifesto
that he would only years later
describe as a revelation.
In it he announced that from
this time forward the L.D.S.
church renounced polygamy.
But if you read that
statement, it is little more
than a piece of advice.
It is not a commandment.
There are there is no "thus
sayeth the Lord"
in the document.
It is not described as a
And I think that Wilford
Woodruff and some of those
authorities working with him
simply looked upon the manifesto
as a device to somehow get the
government to back off, and they
hoped that the manifesto
would save them.
NARRATOR: The church's
official renunciation of
polygamy and other political
concessions finally led to
statehood for Utah in 1896.
But some Mormons continued to
practice plural marriage in
secret even when the Church
threatened them with
excommunication.
For Mormons to walk away from
polygamy was related very
directly to their understanding
of how one was saved.
Sometimes I think it's easy to
think of if you went to another
Christian and said, "The United
States is going to legislate
against baptism.
You can't baptize anymore. "
Well, what would they do?
They would dig a they would
start doing it in
their swimming pools.
They'd dig a hole
in their basements.
They would still baptize.
So Mormons were still performing
these celestial marriages.
In my own view, the largest
consequence of it fed into the
development of fundamentalism,
which arose in the early 20th
century, where many who had been
engaged in these very practices
secretly, lying about them,
believed that the Church, now
having decided to go clean on it
and stop the practice, was yet
being dishonest, and felt that
they had as much license and
permission to continue to do so
themselves as church authorities
had done in the past.
As the 20th century
progresses the leadership of the
L.D.S. Church makes the decision
no longer to be passively
opposed to polygamy, they decide
to aggressively root out the
practitioners of polygamy
because they believe they're an
enduring stain on the reputation
of the Church.
And so the Church develops an
informant system.
They develop a close working
partnership with local law
enforcement to identify church
members, identify them for
prosecution to make a dramatic
show of the formal breaking of
the L.D.S. Church with any
vestige of polygamy.
NARRATOR: But all that would
backfire in 1953, when state
troopers, with church support,
raided the small polygamist
community of Short
Creek, Arizona.
It is a night of no moon, so
it's perfect darkness, and the
police roll into the
town of Short Creek.
And much to their
disappointment, they're greeted
by the men and women gathered in
the town square singing "God
Bless America. "
The police take the
men into custody.
They drive them away to Kingman,
Arizona, to face trial.
The women and the children are
also taken into state custody.
And what happens is these
evidentiary photos start getting
published in newspapers and
national magazines, and rather
than snowball towards
conviction, it produces this
great public sentiment, leave
these people alone.
My parents were both involved
in the Short Creek raid.
They were both small
children at the time.
My father was taken from his
parents and lived with an
adopted he was adopted out to
a family and he lived with them
for a time, and here are
families and they're living
their life, and all of a sudden
they're just ripped apart.
If I had to go through that, I
don't know what I would do.
NARRATOR: Many of the
estimated 30,000 to 60,000
fundamentalist Mormons who still
practice polygamy today claim
that they are the real Mormons,
that they practice the principle
of plural marriage as revealed
to Joseph Smith and will not
obey the later renunciations by
the Church.
Joseph Smith told us that if
we wanted to become gods, we had
to do as God had done, and God
lived polygamy.
And in the Bible, Abraham lived
polygamy, and he said that if we
want those blessings and we want
to attain godhood, that we had
to do as they had done.
There is no such thing as a
Mormon fundamentalist.
It is a contradiction to use the
two words together.
More than a century ago, God
clearly revealed unto his
prophet Wilford Woodruff that
the practice of plural marriage
should be discontinued, which
means that it is now against the
law of God.
NARRATOR: Today the public
face of polygamy is often that
of its most extreme adherents
like Warren Jeffs, who was the
absolute ruler of an isolated
community of Mormon
fundamentalists.
Are you Warren Jeffs?
Yes.
NARRATOR: He recently pled
not guilty to charges that he
was an accomplice to rape for
arranging the marriage of a 14-
year-old girl to an older man.
The fundamentalist groups
that practice polygamy in the
contemporary setting have been
marginalized.
They've been isolated, where
they are turned so far inward
that can make them much more
likely to be subjected to the
strong personality and
determined beliefs of someone
such as Warren Jeffs.
NARRATOR: But most
fundamentalist Mormons live
quiet even ordinary lives,
some in their own small
communities, others in
the larger society.
They are wealthy and poor, urban
and rural.
While polygamy is still a crime,
few are prosecuted.
We have 15 people in our
family, three mothers and 11
Even as a little girl, I saw the
beauty in plural marriage and
always wanted to live it.
We believe in present-day
revelation, and the process by
which I got married, it was
through prayer and a
lot of inner work.
It's not through courtship.
It's more like an arranged
As far as my experiences of
being a first wife and having
other women come into my life
and my husband's life, it's
you know, it's difficult.
Living the principle of plural
marriage, it is a refiner's
fire, because it gives you the
opportunity to see yourself in a
light or in a way that you would
not have the
opportunity otherwise.
You are put in circumstances to
show yourself and other people
and God what choice you are
going to make, whether or not
you are a loving, giving person
or if you are going
to be selfish.
It's pretty much a process of
development oh, this is
awful.. that you get
in no other way.
People are innately jealous.
Just depends on what you're
jealous about.
So, you know, I'ive had to deal
with that, as far as, you know,
sharing my husband.
And really, it's learning the
context in which you can share
the most intimate part of your
life with these other women.
It's not necessarily
yours, it's ours.
The purpose of religion in my
life is it's comprised of the
principles that transform my
character into the character
similar of God.
I mean, it's how I
can become like God.
The focus of plural marriage
becomes the family raising
children who will want to become
like God and who will please
But we want society to respect
our desire to live beyond, to
live deeper, to live a life that
takes us further than
those around us.
When you see adults and
families of conscience, of free
will, enter into this union, it
puts you in pause for a second
and you recognize that you can't
broadly characterize polygamy as
black or white.
There is a huge swath of gray
over this issue as it's
practiced in the
western United States.
Mainstream orthodox Mormons
today, while officially they
deplore polygamy, nevertheless,
somewhere naggingly at the back
of their minds, is a great
ambivalence because this was a
revelation to Joseph Smith.
What are they going to say, God
didn't reveal it
to him, you know?
It was, to them, a very profound
moment in their history, and
very, very important, and these
people keep it alive.
NARRATOR: Like many of their
beliefs, polygamy had put the
Mormons in conflict with
themselves and with
their country.
It was a struggle that was in so
many ways emblematic
of their entire
journey.
In this microcosm of the
Latter-day Saints, which is only
at most 180 years old, you have
a definition of the American
experience itself, not just what
it means to be unique, but what
it means to deal
with the unique.
Not just to say, "I'm going to
hold fast to my principle. "
But what does it mean to back
off from your principle and seek
accommodation?
How do you go from being the
ultimate outcast to the
embodiment of the mainstream in
two generations?
It's a breathtaking
transformation