I went into the Dollar Store tonight and low and behold..The movie/DVD section had the movie "September Dawn".
I heard about this tragedy so I purchased the DVD and watched it as soon as I got home.I was horrified at what I was seeing.
I was sooo disgusted and ashamed that I EVER let myself be brainwashed in to that Mormon cult.Even though I left it very shortly after I became a member because I saw the light and realized it was a weird church.It has taken me 32 years to finally(thanks to the internet) do research about this cult and since I have stumbled upon many sites about that cult I am really learning more and more about it's moronic practices.This movie.(September Dawn) was really another wake up call for me about those cultists.Anyone else view this movie?

No, never heard of it. From the title of your post, though, I'm assuming it's about the MMM and is worth looking into.

And most of us here were brainwashed by the cult. The important thing is, we figured it out. Pat yourself on the back for that and try to let go of your self-disgust and shame (easier said than done, I know).

The church gloated because it was a critical and box office dud. The Anti-Defamation League denounced it as bigotry toward mormons.

My problem with the movie is that it casts the mormons as entranced steely-eyed Manson-like intrinsically murderous lunatics. This, I think, misses the point that otherwise normal people can rationalize atrocities, and it casts their murderous behavior as inevitable instead of inexplicable. The movie doesn't do enough to explain the delusion the mormons were laboring under, including their "gospel", and warmongering church leaders.

The movie is a win-win-win for the church because it reinforces the part-myth of isolated rogue vigilante and crazy loose-cannon culprits, and does not convincingly incriminate Young, which is the church's own apologetic propaganda anyway, AND it was a critical and box-office dud, AND the church gets persecution points from anti-bigotry watchdogs.


I think the only chagrin to the church is the sheer vomit-value of the massacre itself. It nauseates you. You can't help but feel sick about the church for having anything whatsoever to do with it. The church's apologetics on it are scrubbed fairly carefully of gorey details other than the number killed. They don't talk, if possible, about the specific way the victims were murdered and how their remains were desecrated. It was more than a slaughter. It was maximal terror. It was "entranced steely-eyed Manson-like intrinsically murderous lunacy", so the movie is right after all, and is actually generous. The church should be thanking them for downplaying it.

+1. Really bad movie. Tehy practically had the Mormons wearing black hats and the Fancher party wearing white hats. No subtlety at all. I recommend "Burying The Past"

A better film to watch is Burying the Past a documentary film about the MMM done by Brian Patrick.

http://www.buryingthepast.com/

I agree.

I appreciated how he just put the information out there, even had interviews with a guy from the church, but didn't really try to sway how you felt about it.

This is a good film minus some of the propaganda that I've heard SD suffers from. There's no need to embellish the events of Sept. 11, 1857. They are horrible enough on their own.

On my way home from Utah this fall I stopped at the MMM sites.

I drove into the big memorial that has a brass plaque and a very large cemented together pile of rocks. It describes the Arkansas Pioneers coming out to the area and how they were camped in the meadow. People had brought permanent arrangements to add to the memorial. Next time I go that way I will bring an arrangement to add to the memorial; bouquet, shiny rocks, etc.

There is another small plaque up on the highway that describes how the men and boys were walked up there away from the camp with a guard for every person. At a pre arranged signal on top of the meadow, each guard turned and killed the person they were escorting. Then the men and boys were buried in a mass grave. The women and children down in the camp were murdered when their guards heard the gunshots on top of the hill. I'm surprised there were any survivors; the children who were later sent back to family in Arkansas.

I was taught in LDS Institute that the company had been bragging all the way out west that they were going to kick some mormon butt when they got to Utah. I think that was a lie. There was no reason for the Arkansas company to say such things. Also who were the people who allegedly killed Parley Pratt for stealing their wife and children? Their names and the names of their kindred were not in the Arkansas company that I've ever seen.

No, the place is wind swept and trees have grown up in places over the years. You can see some other piles of rocks out there that were also burial spots but you'd have to climb a four strand barb wire fence and walk across a privately owned cow pasture full of dried weedy grass to get there.

They were murdered for their cattle.

The land is tough and dry and many hard miles between water holes. It is not easy to eat food that is watered by alkaline water; it tastes bitter. My Oregon snap peas were not sweet even though they had plenty of fertilizer, the alkaline water is so strong it leaches up white like snow on the ground as it dries where you water. Utah was not a healthy place to live and Brigham abused the saints in his efforts to build his empire. Drove them so crazy they were willing to kill innocent passerby s for their goods.....then cover up their murder.....

The issue for critical thinkers who encounter claims BY didn't order the event is how the Iron County militia could've had an encounter with the emigrants late Friday afternoon at Cedar City, and then attacked the party 35 miles away on Monday morning.

It's clear there was advance notice of their coming...

I like this book that gives an excellent overview of the larger picture...

http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/1527/the%20mormon%20rebellion

Mormon versions of the entire matter are junk revisionist history at its worst; Bagley told a story of one author who managed an entire volume on the Utah War and never once mentioned MMM....

These men were participants at Mountain Meadows September 11 1857:


William H. Dame - Stake President (Parowan)

Isaac C. Haight - Stake President (Cedar) and mastermind

John H. Higbee - 1stCounselor to Haight

Philip Klingensmith - Bishop (Cedar)

John Doyle Lee - Bishop

Nephi Johnson later became presiding elder, acting bishop, and bishop's counselor in succession

George Albert Smith - 2nd in command of LDS church, in 1868 made 1counselor to Brigham Young

William C. Stewart High Priest

Daniel Hanmer Wells Apostle and 2nd Counselor to Brigham

MMM Highlights the ChurchCo inability to 'fess up to their mistakes, their habits, highly developed over time, to spin things beyond truthfulness.

Reason: they Don't Want individuals to develop their own sense of Right/Wrong.period.

I found my visit to the MMM site to be an eerie sense of depression, forboding. It sorta creeped me out.

best thing for ChurchCo to do is turn it over to gov't.
make it a state or Nat'l memorial site.
STOP with your CONTROL of the place.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2012 10:38AM by guynoirprivateeye.

The movie incorrectly shows interactions between the emigrants and the Mormons (including a ridiculous fictitious love story) leaving a false impression of the dynamics between them. This distortion does not serve the truth.

The producers of September Dawn used footage of the massacre scene that was ripped off from Brian Patrick's award winning film, "Burying the Past" without compensation to him.


Here is the website for Burying the Past: http://www.buryingthepast.com/

It's funny, when I was TBM, I bought all the apologist lines about the MMM.

"There is no evidence directly linking Brigham with the MMM. In fact, Brigham openly denounced it."

"The quantity of violent vigilante crimes in Utah wasn't significantly different from the same type of crimes elsewhere in the wild west."

"The actions of a few rotten mormons doesn't reflect significantly on the goodness of the church as a whole."

The only one of these I still kind of agree with is the first. There's no good reason to suspect Brigham Young ordered murders. The second point, even if true, is not as important as comparing the frequency of mormon murders during the time of the emphasis of blood atonement (1856-1858) and the less-heated time periods before and after. The third argument is anecdotal and as far as I'm concerned untrue.

I just point out the list I posted above.

These few rotten members were the Priesthood leaders and continued in good standing. Being the enforcers and teachers under Brigham Young, even in the absence of a direct order, I suspect that they knew what he would want done with the Fancher Party and acted/organized accordingly.

These Priesthood Leadership types were responsible for the Aiken Party massacre as well.

Yes a Few Rotten Types were involved, and the membership was REQUIRED to follow their Rotten Priesthood Leadership, especially during the Reaformation years in which these events took place.

I think a great story line to a movie would be showing 2-3 different perspectives of a convert, a BIC, and a nevermo (with many mo friends and/or family) journey through the church in these 3 perspective views with genuine real world athenticity and each come to discover the fraud of LDS inc.

Almost like a detective investigation (first person narrative with voice overs) where each have their own unique method of stumbling upon the fiction of LDS Inc and its grand cover up. I can be based on true stories such as those presented on this board or mormonthink.com etc... but charactors would be fictionalized to protect names and so forth.

I would hope the script would be well written and it would be directed by the finest in hollywood to bring to life the hell we all have endured both as and not as mormons.

"There's no good reason to suspect Brigham Young ordered murders."

I disagree strongly with this idea. Did BY push the "button" to order the specific action, probably not. But I think there is clear evidence that he knew exactly how his general instructions would potentially be carried out in the same way that "instructions" were issued to Hutu militiamen in Rwanda and in similar places around the world.

For a very compelling explanation of the evidence of Young's complicity please see Will Bagley's address here:

http://www.salamandersociety.com/interviews/willbagley/

Bagley says, in part:

" . . . I also felt that if I was going to conclude that Brigham Young did this, and make an argument that he did, that I also better have pretty damn good evidence. But that's one thing I did not set out to do (in my book on the subject), to prove that Brigham Young ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre. First of all, I didn't think that it was even possible. And I still don't think, no, I'm sure that if I had a signed confession from Brigham Young, validated as being in his handwriting by Dean Jessee and every other Mormon expert on handwriting, witnessed by all twelve of the apostles, nobody would believe it. It wouldn't make any difference. So I recognized that it was foolish to try to build a polemic, to try to prove something. So what I realized was that no one's ever told this story very well.

This is an incredible story. It is an awful tale, but it is an American tragedy. First of all, it's an American crime, and it is an incredible epic story. So I thought, look, if I can tell this story accurately and fairly, tell what happened and when---and I believe chronology is a key to understanding history. I'm of the school of history that believes one damn thing happens after another, and that chance plays an enormous role in human history. And that if you want to track an event, look at the sequence of events. In many ways, chronology is the key to figuring out the basic parameters about Meadows.

Here's an example: The Fancher party doesn't get to Cedar City until Friday evening, September 4th. On Monday morning, September 7th, they are attacked by a large force of Mormons and Indians. And these Indians are allegedly assembled all the way from the Muddy River, which is 80-90 miles away from Mountain Meadows, all the way up to Cedar City, which is a span of 120 miles.

But guess what? You can't get pissed off on Friday night, and organize an orchestrated military attack on the Fancher train over the weekend! You simply can't get your people there to do it. So what does that tell you? It means that whoever ordered this event did it before the Fancher party got to southern Utah. It was ordered before they got there. Whatever they did in southern Utah was irrelevant. It didn't matter. Their fate had already been determined elsewhere."

Bagley believes Young ordered the murders, he says:

"Why do I believe this? I believe it because that's what Brigham Young said had happened. I want to read the quote. This was stated, I believe, on the 30th of May 1861. The week before, Brigham Young had gone through Mountain Meadows, and he had come to the site of the grave where after two years, the U. S. Army had arrived, and found the bones of these people still littered on the ground.

They found tresses of hair scattered about, found the clothing of women and children, and they gathered up the remains they could find, and they interred them in several different graves. At the site of the wagon siege, they put the bodies in the siege pits they'd dug to defend themselves, gave them a military burial, orienting them as they would fallen soldiers, and then raised a cairn above their grave. At the top, they put a verse from Romans, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."

Brigham Young showed up with an entourage of 120 people, riding in his carriage, rode up, looked at the monument with the inscription and said, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I have taken a little." And he raised his arm to the square, and as Dimmick Huntington told his granddaughter Juanita Brooks, "Within five minutes, not one rock was standing on another."

A week later, after preaching at John D. Lee's [?], "President Young said The company that was used up at Mountain Meadows were the fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and connections of those that murdered the prophets. They merited their fate, and the only thing that ever troubled him was the lives of the women and children, but that under the circumstances, this could not be avoided."

A careful reading of the detailed history shows that Brigham was a cruel cult leader as deluded and dangerous as Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, or Kim Il Sung.

This fish sticks from the HEAD down.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2012 12:58PM by rodolfo.

I think BY needs to be held responsible for other additional reasons. He was the supreme ruler and the buck stopped with him. Supposing he didn't know aobut MMM. that would mean he *should* have known and failed miserably to keep informed and in command.

Then after the event he did not promptly investigate and punish the guilty or attempt to make restitution for the attrosities, Instead, he made up lies which blamed the victims and he personally confiscationed some of the spoils as his own.

And it is certain that he ordered and participated in the subsequent cover-up of the murders slandering the native Americans. Accessory after the fact at a minimum.

And I would add that anyone that could do what Brigham did AFTER the fact is so morally bankrupt that ordering the massacre is a chasm of inches, easily crossed.

John D. Lee notes that George A. Smith, whose journey to the southern settlements, began just after the doomed wagon train arrived in this valley, asked him cryptically if the Southern Utahans would make things "lively" for the emigrants.

Smith's extensive "smears" of the emigrants began on the trip south and included fabrications implying they'd been involved in the murders of Joseph and Hyrum, poisoned the running spring, etc. His presence is only "circumstantial," but it is entirely reasonable to believe he carried the order from Young via word-of-mouth.

Bagley and Bigler's "Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre" reproduces much of the surviving original source material, and I consider it essential for serious students of the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Innocent-Blood-Essential-Narratives-Mountain/dp/0870623621

For me, the critical issue is whether 50-80 priesthood holders would willingly participate in a cold-blooded slaughter without sanction from the leadership in Salt Lake. I don't believe they would.

Anyone wanting to see the actual text of this highly inflammatory speech can see it here.

www.truthandgrace.com/1857GeorgeSmithSermon0913.htm

Note also that Bagley cites firsthand evidence that many "priesthood holders" who participated in the murders believed that they themselves would be killed if they didn't do it. Who believes that the mormon leaders who threatened death to worthy members just did this on their own? Not me.

Shades of Rwanda and Srebrenca indeed?!!

i saw it not too long ago.

heartbreaking to say the least.


men, women, and children slaughtered like animals.


but who cares!! a university with 3 campuses was named after the perpetrator anyway. the church is true no matter what.

rename that college (system, campuses) after Juanita Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks University.

she told the Truth, BY DIDNT.

ChurchCo: Which one's the hero/heroine?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2012 07:23PM by guynoirprivateeye.

[Twinker]:
Thank you for the heads-up on this, but I really do not know what I would say except "buy my film and learn for yourself," but that seems a little too self-serving, you know. Last September 11th I was down at the Meadows for the dedication of the new "National Historic Landmark" status for the site. The descendants that showed walked the same trail that their ancestors walked before they were murdered. A partially overcast day as we walked, with the tall, brown grasses still blown dry by the wind. It was a solemn and emotional occasion as you can imagine. Later, officials from the LDS Church stood up, wept, and told about how sad and sorry they felt. Not that I want to let them off the hook, but for the first time, I heard what was a true, heart felt, apology about the horrific events that their church help cause there at the Meadows 1857. Perhaps the passing of the "old guard" like President Hinkley (who did a lot to bring the issue out, but then refused an apology) has forced the Church to be more up front and apologetic. I would also like to think that my film, "Burying the Past" also contributed to their more contrite attitude. I still don't truly trust the LDS Church, because they still own the massacre site property, and thereby control all public interpretation of the massacre that is placed there, even though it is now a National Historic Landmark. I do know this: it is a horrible, human tragedy, ever evolving, a story is one that never seems to end, nor ever should. Post this if you like.
Regards, Brian Patrick, Director, Burying the Past

I mean think about it folks. Any dern fool can poison a well but poisoning a flowing spring takes some kinda wicked magic.

What September Dawn DIDN'T cover was how, the victims were stripped of everything, clothing, personal effects, their supplies. and left naked to rot and feed the wild life.

What the movie didn't cover was how the Fauncher party tried to surrender to the "indians", by sending out two 8 year old little girls dressed in white, who were shot to death.

The Mormons approached under a white flag, and the emigrants sent out one of the girls in a white dress, and negotiations for their surrender proceeded from there (Source: Massacre Survivor Rebecca Dunlap, take from "Blood of the Prophets," p. 144)

Please don't pass on unsubstantiated claims; the Mormon faithful use such errors to discredit this site...

And I look like a rude S.O.B. when I have call a liar a liar...

the main story is 'righteous intimidation', whether or not SL/BY was involved or not.
IF Mormons were trained Values instead of "Follow the Profit", things Might have had another outcome; IOW, if enough people said NO, this is WRONG.

try to Deny THAT, ChurchCo...

In a sosoiaty where the first relegious story tought to children is one where a mans head is cut of by his brother and his things stolen wile he slept and all in the name of god, is going to cause major problems. When killing in the name of god is justified then all you have to do is mention god.

From page 343 Blood Of The Prophets

In about 1927 a small group of John D.Lee descendants met with President Heber J. Grant while the mormon prophet was visiting Arizona. They complained about the treatment of Lee in Apostle Joseph Fielding Smiths' Essentials in Church History a textbook used in LDS church schools.
Heber J. Grant aknowledged he had authorized Smiths book but admitted that he had never read it and promised it would no longer be used as a text in church schools.

He then told a chilling story about the massacre. Grant said that Joseph F. Smith told him had he not been in Hawaii at the time of the massacre but in southern Utah, Smith "Would have no doubt been in the midst of the fray."

Grant added, "I would have been in it too, or I hope I would."

He advised, "This affair should never be mentioned."

(statement of Anton Lee in Brimhalls book Gleanings Concerning John D. Lee, 2)
Brimhall, Edna Lee, comp. “Gleanings of John D. Lee.” Arizona Historical Society, Library and Archives, Tucson, AZ. Copy at CHL.

Since they already have most of the faithful members buying all the "he was speaking/acting as a man" and "whatever the current prophet says supersedes the past leaders" talk, what would it hurt them to just pull all that out in church and officially apologize?

It seems like it wouldn't sway the uberfaithful, and would go a long way to makIng themselves look a little better to the rest of the world...

And there is no explanation that won't undercut the foundation of the Church.