The Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons and Paiutes killed some 120 men, women, and children in September 1857, has been the subject of heated debate for more than a century and a half. A convoluted documentary record, legal prosecutions and cover-ups, and competing family, cultural, and religious identities have combined to foment a swirling torrent of explanations and revisions, accusations and counter-accusations.

Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ronald Walker, Richard Turley Jr., and Glen Leonard, is one of a recent spate of books trying to make sense of the gruesome tale for a modern audience. All three authors are practicing Mormons, and have spent much or all of their careers (including the research and writing of this book) in the LDS Church's employ. Readers must therefore take, on faith, the authors' claim that the book is the result of a “fresh approach based upon every primary source,” and that LDS Church leaders, who control much of the archival material related to the massacre, “supported [the] book by providing full and open disclosure” (x–xi). The ultimate question for this book's credibility, perhaps more than most, is whether the authors gain the reader's trust.

The short answer, for most readers, should be yes. Massacre at Mountain Meadows deserves to be the standard account of the massacre for both LDS and non-LDS researchers and readers, updating Juanita Brooks's fine but now outdated The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1950), and surpassing other recent treatments, most notably Will Bagley's useful but flawed Blood of the Prophets (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002). Walker, Turley, and Leonard have provided a tightly written, riveting narrative; even those previously familiar with the story will be drawn in by the heart-wrenching pathos of chapter 13, where the killing is described in detail. While its prose is commendable, the real quality of the book rests upon the impressiveness of its research and the soundness of its analysis.

The authors quickly put to rest any suspicion that they will adopt an apologist tone. In the very first sentence of the preface, they assign primary blame to the Mormon perpetrators, accusing them of a litany of crimes from deceit to treachery to cold-blooded murder. While assessing the secondary responsibility of a number of actors—including President James Buchanan and the federal government, Brigham Young and other LDS leaders, some of the more boastful and provocative emigrants, and some Paiutes—the book demonstrates that it was local Mormons, led primarily by Isaac Haight and John D. Lee, who orchestrated and carried out the massacre. The perpetrators' behavior is analyzed so as to be understood (as much as mass murder can be), but it is never excused, and it is ultimately characterized as “premeditated, evil, and cunning” (199).

Given the intense emotions surrounding the massacre, both in 1857 and since, this book is remarkably calm, lacking the hysterics of some other accounts. Although the authors clearly disagree with some of the recent literature on the massacre, their writing never becomes polemical or tendentious. If anything, their reluctance to engage other authors on key points is sometimes a negative, as it would be helpful to readers to see more clearly where these authors differ from other major interpreters.

The authors reserve their most overt disagreement with previous scholarship, appropriately, for the question that investigators have pursued since the earliest inquiries into the causes of the massacre. The authors explicitly counter Bagley's argument that Brigham Young essentially ordered the attack on the emigrants, contending that “neither chronology nor unfolding events confirm such a charge” (146). Though absolved of direct responsibility, Young does not escape without criticism, however: his declaration of martial law after hearing about the advance of the federal army in July contributed to heightened Mormon militancy, and his insufficiently clear Indian policy issued in August “may have confused some local leaders” (137).

A particular strength of Massacre at Mountain Meadows is its contextualization of the violence, both as a psychological reaction to anti-Mormon persecution of the 1830s and 1840s, which deeply scarred the nineteenth-century Mormon mind, and as a manifestation of Mormons' participation in the broader antebellum culture of extralegal violence employed to preserve individual and community rights against outside threats. The book also profitably draws on various modern studies of religious violence and mass killing, helping its analysis transcend the literatures of Mormon and Western history. Accordingly, the authors conclude that, “The conditions for mass killing—demonizing, authority, obedience, peer pressure, ambiguity, fear, and deprivation—all were present in southern Utah in 1857” (xiv).

What remains missing from this list of conditions, and from the book's title, is any mention of religion. To be sure, religion is never far from the forefront, and the authors chronicle a number of aspects of early Mormonism that helped set the stage for the massacre: millennialism, dualism, obedience to church hierarchy, the Mormon Reformation, LDS doctrines about the “Lamanites” (Native Americans), militant sermons by church leaders, and so forth. But while the authors go to great lengths to demonstrate that Mormons were responsible for the massacre, they skirt the issue of whether Mormonism is at all accountable. Whereas other historians have made much of three contemporaneous instances of Mormon violence against non-Mormons, here the cases are mentioned only in passing (109, 126, 139). Furthermore, the oath made as part of the nineteenth-century LDS temple covenant to avenge “the blood of the prophets” (referring to Joseph and Hyrum Smith's murder, and providing the title for Bagley's book), is barely mentioned (14). The authors seem to have opted for a tight, readable narrative dealing only with what they believe are the direct, proximate causes of the massacre, consciously leaving ancillary causes for other scholars' elaboration and the aftermath of the massacre for a forthcoming volume.

Ultimately, the book presents Mountain Meadows as an “American tragedy,” not an essentially Mormon or religious one. In so doing, it privileges the question of how “ordinary humans” can perform atrocious acts (xiii) but never fully confronts the equally important (but different) problem of at what point religious structures, institutions, and ideologies are responsible for the harmful actions of their adherents. Early Mormonism appears here as a tradition containing possibilities for both peaceful reconciliation and violent extremism. Indeed, in this excellent volume readers of every stripe—from undergraduates to scholars to the general public—will find not only the finest extant account of the tragedy at Mountain Meadows but also a window onto the potential, but by no means inevitable, power of religion to contribute to mass violence.