Vengeance is mine, and I have taken a little

The expression Vengeance is mine, and I have taken a little appears when Brigham Young encounters a memorial to the people killed at Mountain Meadows. He alters the cross’s scriptural promise of divine retribution into a claim that he has already exacted some vengeance himself. The retort gives the book’s account of the massacre a grim verbal reversal: a phrase of sacred justice becomes, in Brigham’s mouth, an assertion of human action, while the memorial itself is soon torn down and erased.

The Memorial and Its Inscription

In 1859, nearly two years after the killing of the Fancher emigrants, army investigators found remains scattered across Mountain Meadows. Soldiers gathered the bones they could recover, placed them in a common grave, and built a crude stone monument above it. Twelve feet high and fifty feet in circumference, the pile was crowned with a wooden cross bearing the words, “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” The inscription placed the dead within a language of future divine judgment; the monument made that promise visible at the site of the crime.

Brigham Young’s Reversal

In May 1861, Brigham Young passed through the meadow during a tour of his southern settlements. According to Wilford Woodruff, Brigham paused over the inscription and proposed changing it to Vengeance is mine, and I have taken a little. The shift is small in wording but decisive in agency: the original assigns repayment to the Lord, whereas Brigham’s version claims that he has already taken some of the vengeance for himself. In the book’s presentation, the remark is not a neutral gloss on the monument. It makes the prophet’s presence at the site collide with the memorial’s appeal to divine justice.

Erasing the Witness

The words were followed by action against the monument. Someone in Brigham’s party threw a rope over the cross and pulled it down; others dismantled the stones and scattered them. By the time the party left, the memorial had been obliterated. The sequence gives the expression a force beyond its verbal irony: the memorial’s appeal to judgment is answered not by investigation or acknowledgment, but by the removal of the public marker.

Persecution Memory and the Meaning of Vengeance

The scene follows the book’s account of how Mormon leaders recalled earlier persecution while preparing for the arrival of the federal army in 1857. Church members were repeatedly reminded of violence in Missouri and Illinois, including the killing of Joseph Smith, and speeches revived memories of mobbings, burnings, and expulsion from Nauvoo. Such recollection helped frame conflict with outsiders and intensify hostility toward the approaching troops. After the massacre, those directing the burial reportedly called for thanks to God for delivering their enemies into their hands, insisted that the Indians alone were responsible, and threatened death for anyone who disclosed the truth. Against this pattern, Brigham’s altered inscription compresses the book’s tension between remembered suffering and the use of vengeance: sacred language remains, but the claimed agent of retribution has changed.