On 11 September 1857 a group of Mormon militia men massacred 120 men, women, and children at Mountain Meadows on the wagon route to California through southern Utah. The militia had promised to help the migrants escape from a siege supposedly laid by the Indians, and when the party had been disarmed and strung out along a trail leading away from their circled wagons, the Mormons slaughtered them all save for the youngest children. Attempts to conceal the event failed. By 1859 news had spread to the east and an investigation begun. It yielded only one convictable culprit, John D. Lee, the adopted son of Brigham Young, who was eventually hanged for the crime in 1877. To the Mormons' enemies, Mountain Meadows epitomised essential Mormon fanaticism. Although the evidence failed to link Brigham Young to the massacre, he was suspected of having master-minded the murders. Dismayed and humiliated, church leaders for a century hushed up the story, and church historians explained the massacre away. They blamed the event on the misbehaviour of the migrants themselves, the fear of an impending invasion by an American army seeking to gain control of Utah territorial government in 1857 and the long history of American persecution of the Mormons. Mountain Meadows was the bitter fruit of their own tragic history, church historians implied, and said little more. Juanita Brooks, an independent Mormon historian from southern Utah, broke the silence in 1950 with a thorough investigation of the sources and a candid account of the event (The Mountain Meadows massacre, Stanford 1950). Her study, however, did not bring the matter to a close. One book after another condemned Brigham Young for ordering the massacre and blamed his successors for covering up the event. Hoping to purge the demons that had pursued the Church for over a century, church leaders in 2001 charged the three authors of this book to tell the whole story and provided the resources to collect all of the relevant evidence. The book does not vindicate the perpetrators, and while finding no evidence that Brigham Young ordered the attack or approved the outcome, holds him culpable for creating an incendiary atmosphere that fostered violence. According to the account by Walker, Turley and Leonard, with an American army moving on Utah in the fall of 1857 and memories of persecutions in Missouri and Illinois still festering, Young's policy became ‘never again’. No more would the Mormons let their enemies trample over them. He ordered the Saints to move south from northern Utah and threatened to torch everything in the army's path. At the same time, to gain Native Indian support during the army's invasion, Young allowed them to raid immigrant trains passing through the territory. In southern Utah the local leaders called upon the Paiutes to open the attack. The rambunctious behaviour of a few members of the Fancher party on their way to California from Arkansas had angered the Mormon residents of Cedar City, who apparently sought to teach the outsiders a lesson. Commissioned by the Mormon leaders, the Indians laid siege to the party in the hope of driving off cattle. When, by accident, a small group of migrants, sneaking out for help, discovered that Mormons were involved, the local Mormon leaders felt that their only recourse was to exterminate the party. Tragedy followed. Massacre at Mountain Meadows tells of the grim outcome without flinching and without excuse.