Mountain Meadows Monument

The Mountain Meadows Monument was a crude stone memorial raised over a common grave for emigrants killed in the Mountain Meadows massacre. Its construction followed a belated federal investigation; its destruction, during Brigham Young’s visit to the site, turned the memorial itself into part of the contested history it had been built to mark.

Investigation and construction

In the spring of 1859, President Buchanan’s secretary of war ordered army brevet major James H. Carleton to investigate persistent reports that Mormons had committed atrocities against the Fancher wagon train. At Mountain Meadows, almost two years after the massacre, Carleton’s party found remains and personal effects scattered across the valley. An army surgeon examined the evidence and concluded that the killings had involved firearms discharged at close range.

Carleton called the massacre a great and fearful crime. His soldiers gathered the remains they could find and buried them together in a common grave. They then hauled stones from the surrounding hillsides and piled them over the grave, building a monument twelve feet high and fifty feet in circumference. A wooden cross stood at its apex, bearing a biblical inscription that placed vengeance in God’s hands.

Inscription and destruction

In May 1861, Brigham Young passed through the meadow while touring his southern settlements. Wilford Woodruff, who accompanied him, recorded that Brigham paused over the inscription and proposed changing its meaning: rather than leaving vengeance to God, he claimed that he had already taken some himself. Soon afterward, one member of the party pulled down the cross with a rope while others dismantled the stones and scattered them. By the time the party left, the monument had been obliterated.

The destruction came amid circumstances that made the act especially consequential. Brigham’s authority in the territory had survived the federal crisis of 1857–58, and the governor appointed to replace him had proved susceptible to Mormon influence. The book also describes Brigham as being in a cheerful frame of mind during this period. The scattered stones therefore did not mark an end to the power struggles surrounding the massacre; they showed how a memorial could be removed even after soldiers had made a public, physical record of the dead.

A monument in a struggle over memory

The memorial stood against an atmosphere in which the massacre’s truth had been deliberately obscured. After the killings, the overseers had insisted that the Native Americans were solely responsible and that the Mormons had taken no part; they also voted that anyone who revealed the secret should die. The monument did not undo that concealment, but its grave and cross made the victims’ deaths difficult to reduce to rumor alone. Its dismantling reversed that act of public witness.

The episode also sits within a wider pattern in the book’s account of Mormon collective memory. Persecution was remembered as a defining test of faith and chosenness, and church leaders repeatedly invoked past violence against the Saints to inflame hostility toward Gentiles during the 1857 crisis. That history of suffering could strengthen communal identity, but it could also sharpen divisions and legitimate resistance. Against that background, Brigham’s alteration of the cross’s message is a pointed reversal: the memorial’s appeal to divine judgment was answered by a leader’s claim to have taken vengeance into his own hands.