Headline:

East Idaho News.com: LDS Church calls recently released Netflix series ‘dangerously misleading’.


https://www.eastidahonews.com/2025/01/lds-church-calls-recently-released-netflix-series-dangerously-misleading/


Excerpts from the article:


January 24, 2025:

“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is calling a recently released Netflix series “dangerously misleading,” claiming it mischaracterizes LDS prophet Brigham Young.


“American Primeval”, which started streaming on Netflix earlier this month, follows a group of LDS pioneers trying to survive the American frontier during the Utah War of 1857.


"The show depicts an event known as the “Mountain Meadows Massacre” where local Latter-day Saint militiamen, aided by American Indian allies, massacred about 120 emigrants traveling by wagon to California.


“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,” a statement from the Church read, in part."

…


“We understand the fascination some in the media have with the Church, but regret that portrayals often rely on sensationalism and inaccuracies that do not fairly and fully reflect the lives of our Church members or the sacred beliefs that they hold dear,” the Church said in a statement."


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Sensationalism and inaccuracies. Yup. Always the go-to response.

I don't know how you can put a pretty face on mud-smeared porkies.

It's a tough spot to be in, having to defend a man like Brigham Young. Or Joseph Smith for that matter. Or ________ - fill in your own list of questionable, at best, Mormon leader/s.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2025 05:54PM by Nightingale.

A "villainous, violent fanatic" sounds about right. There is no way that you can pretty up the MMM.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> A "villainous, violent fanatic" sounds about
> right. There is no way that you can pretty up the
> MMM.

This is the AI response to the charge of BY being fanatical:

"No, Brigham Young was not a fanatic, but rather a religious leader and pioneer who taught the Gospel of Jesus Christ. However, some portrayals of Young in popular media have depicted him as a violent fanatic."

Who taught that gospel to AI I wonder?!

I have maintained an aversion to consulting AI even though it is always the first response to every query I make online. This is one example of why I prefer to choose my own sources.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2025 06:05PM by Nightingale.

Also (from a general Net look-up):

"Young brought his followers to Utah, where he led efforts to legalize slavery in the Utah Territory. Brigham Young taught his followers that slavery was ordained by God and that efforts to abolish it were contrary to the decrees of God and would eventually fail."

Yet another failed prophecy. To date anyway...

BYU should be renamed after a less violent fanatic, like Charles Manson. Unfortunately, the initials are already taken by Carnegie Mellon.

Yeah. Whiners. The D-News has written at least 3 articles about American Primeval. All bitching about how MMM was portrayed. I commented on their online comment board that the portrayal was actually kind to LDS Inc. That they omitted the part where MMM was a 3 day ordeal. And that they didn't show the part where in the middle there was a cease fire and the mormon militia rode into the Fancher camp. They promised the Fancher party that if they laid down their weapons, they be guaranteed safe passage out of Utah. They foolishly believed them. They gave up their weapons and the mormons came in and shot them all. Well, I guess the thin skinned mormon church is still lying and covering. They promptly banned me from commenting for 24 hours. Cowards.

The truth hurts.

>They promised the Fancher party that if they laid down their weapons, they be guaranteed safe passage out of Utah. They foolishly believed them.

They had been surrounded for days and were likely running out of water and ammunition. They didn't "foolishly" believe them. They had no alternative.

The best of very few, very bad remaining options.

Using a flag of truce to attack shows no honor. I’m sure when the US Army got word of that they were livid. Brigham was lucky Johnston wanted to keep the peace. It really was the Civil War that gave Brigham a longer reign. Lincoln had bigger problems to deal with. Polygamy would have been outlawed sooner if the war didn’t happen.

Titled "The real massacre was ‘so much more brutal’ — ‘American Primeval’ and the truth about Mountain Meadows"


https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2025/01/25/american-primeval-mountain-meadows/

A few excerpts

"Brown • The massacre took place during the Utah War.
Which was what?

Brown • It was a conflict between the U.S. government, in which it sent troops to occupy the Utah Territory, and the local Latter-day Saint leaders and settlers, who wanted to resist those troops coming into their territory.

The series was very confusing to me. In it, the massacre seemed to take place just a few miles outside of Fort Bridger, in modern-day Wyoming. In fact, the attack took place hundreds of miles away in southwest Utah, near what is today St. George.

The perpetrators of the massacre did not wear hoods. In the show, it looked like the KKK, but wearing potato sacks on their heads. In reality, they did not need to wear hoods because they wiped out all the witnesses who were adults. The only people who survived the massacre were 17 young children ages 6 and under, most of whom were babies and toddlers. And they were spared only because they were considered “too young to tell tales” by the Mormon militia."

"Brown • The way the massacre occurred was actually so much more brutal than the way it was portrayed.

There was an initial attack by the Mormons, who were intending to run off their cattle. It didn’t work. So they kind of got into a skirmish and the Arkansas immigrants quickly circled their wagons. A five-day siege set in.

Ultimately, on Sept. 11, 1857, Mormon militiamen, through false promises of protection, said that they were there to rescue the immigrants from the attacking Indians, tricked them, had them walk out and then slaughtered all of them. So not a single Mormon was killed or even hurt in the massacre.

They did go through afterward and shoot in the head any survivors who weren’t killed in that final massacre. And they did loot the bodies. There is a story of one of the perpetrators pulling a gold watch off the body of one of the victims as depicted in the show. So that part was accurate."

"Brown • As the series showed, there were a small number of Paiutes involved. We don’t know from the historical record how many were there, but I do want to say that it was relatively small compared to the entire Paiute Nation and the Mormon militiamen who carried this out.

The Mormons tricked, if you will, or got some small number of Paiutes involved because they wanted to blame the whole massacre on them, and that’s exactly what they did. And so, unfortunately, the Paiute Nation has unjustly borne blame for this, when the focus needs to be put on the white perpetrators who actually orchestrated this.

In the series, the Paiute say, ‘We participated in the massacre so we could get women and cattle.’ That was a complete falsehood. The Paiute were promised cattle, and that’s what they got."

"Parry • I’ve always kind of given Brigham Young a break. He had a hard job bringing the Saints west and creating a new Zion and so forth. But his rhetoric and how he talked and how some of his words may have incited some of his people and empowered them through Manifest Destiny — you can almost do anything in the name of Manifest Destiny. And we have clear indication of that in 1850, when the Saints were having problems with the Timpanogos Natives in Utah County.

The locals wanted to completely annihilate the Timpanogos band. Brigham Young preached in a meeting, saying we don’t want to kill them but we need them to move. Eventually, though, he relented and signed an extermination order in 1850 for those members of the Timpanogos band who wouldn’t move. That extermination order was carried out."

"What is your advice for anyone who’s about to watch the series?

Brown • I would just recommend that when you’re watching it, please understand the whole thing is highly, highly fictionalized. There’s so much great history on the Utah War and the Mountain Meadows Massacre and Brigham Young that people can go read and learn the truth about."

A link to the podcast:

https://www.sltrib.com/podcasts/mormonland/

I know Darren Parry, met him at the restoration project the NW Band of Shoshone are doing on the land where the tribe had traditionally overwintered, and where the Bear River Massacre took place.

He was at least a little sympathetic to BY in the article quoted above. He was impressed with the way the series portrayed the Shoshone people. They got the language right, and the customs, especially the fact that it was a matriarchal society.

The series made it look like the MMM occurred near Ft Bridger, WY, when in fact it was in southern Utah, over 400 miles away. There were no Paiutes anywhere near Ft Bridger, nor any Shoshone anywhere near Mountain Meadows.

The series also made it look like BY was a regular visitor to Ft Bridger. That was definitely not the case. I guess it was a 3 to 5 day journey from SLC to Ft Bridger via horse and wagon. I think the only wagon route at the time was SLC, up through Logan to Preston, ID, over the Wasatch to Montpelier ID, east to Kemmerer WY and back down to Ft Bridger. It was a significant effort to get to Ft Bridger and back.

Also BY in the series ordered the MMM. Not the case as far as we can tell. He may have created an atmosphere that made the MMM more likely to occur, but he did not specifically order it.

And yes, the actual violence of MMM was toned down some in the tv series.

So, the Netflix team played fast and loose with many historical points, but sounds to me like they got the essence of what happened pretty much accurate. And hey, they got BY's haircut right (but not the color, which was really sandy red). :)

It says it's not too far from Park City. Is that not true?

I've never known exactly where it was, but thought, for some reason,
it was further south.

Mountain Meadow is in southern Utah ~30 miles north of St. George on highway 18.

LOL.

When it comes to complaining about "dangerously misleading," maybe the church should sit this one out.

LOL, dagny.

Shiver me timbers! Are you implying that the BoM is dangerously misleading? You know, about THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WESTERN HEMISHERE? (and a bit of Egypt, as well).

Hahaha. Guilty as charged. I WAS hinting at that!

I’ve watched the first 2 or 3 episodes, and I agree with all the comments above that TSCC is portrayed way too lightly in terms of both atrocities and culpability.

On a positive note, the storyline pegged Brigham Young as a pedophile and polygamist within the first 30 minutes of episode 1.

Netflix is ENTERTAINMENT, not a fake news outlet like FOX…

just sayin’



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2025 10:45PM by GNPE.

The Church seems to have problems when a movie steers closer to history than they are comfortable. I have watched the series and loved it!

Young practically bankrupted the church when he died, because xxx he xxx claimed all church monies and properties as his own and that of his family. It took the church years to sort it all out, and they lost a lot of their own property because there was no real way to extricate it from the property of his children. This made the next generation of Youngs quite wealthy. If I were a church leader, I'd have raised a post-mortem stink about this.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2025 04:59PM by Maude.

So Brethren, can you tell us how wrong it is and correct our impressions by letting us all know just how many people the Faithful Brethren murdered at Mounain Meadows?