Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Supernatural

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Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Supernatural

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Juanita Brooks has her work set out for her: she needs to explain a historical event that has long been ignored and lied about. She must avoid sounding biased and present herself as a reputable historian. One of her challenges in this undertaking is how she should deal with the large amounts of supernaturalism surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Although she does periodically use some supernatural accounts for dramatic evidence and to support her own hypothesis in small amounts, Brooks typically discredits the supernatural aspects (both folkloric and religious) of the Mountain Meadows Massacre,

While Brooks is capable of dismissing the supernatural in folklore traditions, and also in her own religion, she does sometimes lapse into giving ear to supernaturalism. Frequently this is for effect, such as while describing a Mormon woman living in fear of the mobs in Illinois who feels a "heavy foreboding of evil" and flees, joining "other wagons…all impelled by the certainty that to remain long would mean death" (8). Brooks doesn't dismiss this prompting as a superstitious story but as a factual experience. Likely for the same dramatic effect, she includes that Brigham Young, whom she later evaluates as a man and not a prophet, "had predicted that 'if our enemies would give us ten years unmolested … we would never be driven again.' Well, the ten years were up, ten years to the day" (18).

As a historian writing a book for lay people, Brooks may be excused for these inclusions of dramatic intent; however she makes the mistake in including supernatural evidence in her defense of John D. Lee. She relates how when a little girl was gravely sick, Lee "kneeled by her bed and prayed for her. He promised her that she should live and become a mother in Israel. She was instantly healed" (203). Brooks relates a second related account. Lee promised another sick girl that she "should live to be a mother in Israel. She grew up to womanhood…and has sixteen children" (204). These supernatural stories are not qualified at all, but left to stand on their own before Brooks informs us that descendents of Lee "feel that he was a great and good man-a martyr" (204). These two recollections may also serve a dramatic purpose, but the acceptance of faith healing by an individual she defends weakens Brooks' objectivity as a historian.

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