Last week a poster, who claimed to be as unaware of the Mountain Meadows Masscre as many LDS are--and non-LDS as well; growing up in Utah I heard next to nothing about it--asked about what happened with "America's First September 11th"? This, of course was wholesale slaughter of 120 men, women and children from Arkansas in Southern Utah on September 11, 1857.

My interest and knowledge on this subject is well known here; it was wanting to learn more that first led me to RFM, and I've followed discussions on the subject closely and read every piece of literature I could find on the matter for over ten years. When Will Bagley published "Blood of the Prophets" in 2002, I attended the promotion he gave at the 2002 Exmormon Foundation Conference, and a solid friendship followed.

Not wanting to be overly provocative with an initial introduction, I stuck with a bare-bones description of what happened (Indeed, I made no mention of the murder of Parley P. Pratt a few months before the massacre and the Arkansas connection with that event). I purposely stayed away from anything congroversial even though my personal view is Brigham Young probably ordered the massacre, and one factor rarely mentioned--other than by Ann Eliza Webb Young--was the wealth and size of the Fancher/Baker train and how that was perhaps a greedy plum for impoverished Southern Utahans that ensured their participating in the grisly deed.

I merely mentioned that most of the initial attackers were probably Mormons dressed as Indians, that a five day siege occurred where the emigrants were cut off from water, and that they were lured out from their stronghold under a flag of truce presented to them by John D. Lee. The wholesale cold-blooded killings followed after the emigrants were disarmed and promised safe passage to Cedar City when accompanied by Mormon militia men.

I even included a link I thought would provide an opportunity for further exploration; I found it on after a Google search where I was looking for links to the writings of Juanita Brooks, Will Bagley, and some others. Here's that link...

http://www.mountainmeadowsmassacre.com

Fifteen minutes or so later, I was horrified to realize I had linked to what was obviously a Mormon apologist site that purported to explain the roots of the massacre and claimed it stemmed from LDS persecution endured in Missouri (there's absolutely no evidence that any of the Fancher/Baker wagon train members were from Missouri, and they all departed Arkansas before the death of Apostle Pratt).

I put up a "Sorry, should've posted a 'Barf Bag Warning'" post, and I e-mailed the news to Will Bagley, wondering if he'd heard it already (It wouldn't be surprising at all if he had).

Here's his reply, reprinted with permission...

>The bad news is that it's the mission of the Corp of the Pres to flood the world with b******t, but the good news is that nobody but Mormons believes any of it.

>As one of Turley's employees told me, "We've got our story and we're sticking to it." It's a pretty sorry-a***d story.

>Will

It occurred to me that perhaps those Mormon apologists had borrowed a tactic from Ed Decker (Decker registered Exmormon.com after he was asked to leave this site by the owner; that site's current domain status is unknown to me, but someone does own it).

So I typed this one into my web browser...

http://www.mountainmeadowsmassacre.org

And incredibly, I arrived at a site promoting the Turley/Walker/Leonard "rebuttal" to "Blood of the Prophets" that the LDS Church underwrote.

I've been promised a copy of this bit of literature that a number of my friends assure me is nothing but bad historical fiction and nonsense that should only be read in small doses with an added advisory that one should refrain from throwing it at anything breakable.

Unbelievable. I'm far more disturbed by these revelations than the knowledge that the LDS Church owns the lands where the massacre victims are buried.

The LDS Church is most unlikely to desecrate a grave site, but they have no qualms about descrating the truth.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2011 12:39AM by SL Cabbie.

Thanks for posting this Cabbie.

If I remember right, didn't FAIR run a site to lead people away from Utah Lighthouse Ministry (Tanner's) by buying a domain name similar to theirs? Seeing a similar thing with the massacre history makes me sick.

I checked Frank Kirkman's by trying .org, so far his is the only one.

http://1857massacre.com

when Brigham Young ordered his lackies to kick down the monument marking the spot and retrieve any/all bones to hide evidence.

But you knew that...:)

Anagrammy

SL Cabbie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It occurred to me that perhaps those Mormon
> apologists had borrowed a tactic from Ed Decker
> (Decker registered Exmormon.com after he was asked
> to leave this site by the owner; that site's
> current domain status is unknown to me, but
> someone does own it).
>
> So I typed this one into my web browser...
>
> http://www.mountainmeadowsmassacre.org
>
> And incredibly, I arrived at a site promoting the
> Turley/Walker/Leonard "rebuttal" to "Blood of the
> Prophets" that the LDS Church underwrote.

I love how honest and forthcoming and direct LDSinc is (snort!). Their passive aggressive campaigns have taught me more about them than just about anything, except perhaps FAIR.

This is a terrible hijack of truth, but not the first time similar tactics have been used by a cult to divert honest inquiry.

In the 90s, the "Church" of $cientology bought up the domain name of the Cult Awareness Network and turned it round so that it attacked $cientology's critics...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_Awareness_Network

Don't you just love it when someone compares TSCC to Scientology?

BOTH of these websites are registered by the More Good Foundation, aka, Allen Wyatt and Daniel Peterson.

Domain name: mountainmeadowsmassacre.com
Domain name: mountainmeadowsmassacre.org

Administrative Contact:
More Good Foundation
Domain Admin ()
1569 N. Technology Way
Building A, Suite 1100
Orem, UT 84097

Allen Wyatt has been doing this for years. His goal with the MGF is to try and create more "pro" sites than "anti" purely to trick people searching the Internet to land on his sites, rather than what he considers "Anti-Mormon". His sites then show a white washed, watered down, or blatantly false information concerning the Mormon Church.

Suppose some "German Skinhead Society" decided to buy the land where a Jewish Concentration Camp once existed. And suppose these Skinheads were the ones building an information center on the site and telling its history?

The world would be outraged!

Yet Mormons have done exactly that!

Not only at the MMM site, but on the Internet as well.

Wait until those Mormons die and have to face the members of that Wagon Train in heaven -- that's the only reason I hope there's a God.