The real massacre was ‘so much more brutal’ — ‘American Primeval’ and the truth about Mountain Meadows
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Bullets fly and arrows whiz amid screams of agony during the chaos that is the “American Primeval” treatment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a merciless attack carried out in southern Utah by Mormon militiamen against a wagon train of emigrants from Arkansas in 1857.
The atrocity marked a moment when long-oppressed members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fearful of outsiders disturbing their hard-won peace, resorted to violence against civilians, slaughtering all but the youngest children.
As “glad” as she is to see the massacre remembered, Barbara Jones Brown, director of Signature Books and co-author of the critically acclaimed “Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath,” warns that there is little recognizable as real in the Netflix version of the carnage.
Brown and Darren Parry, former chair of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and author of “The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History,” appeared on a recent episode of The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast for a side-by-side comparison of history and Hollywood as it relates to the massacre. (Below are excerpts of that conversation, edited for clarity.):
Brown • The massacre took place during the Utah War.
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.
Content retrieved from: https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2025/01/25/american-primeval-mountain-meadows/.
