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Thirteen years after the massacre, the church excommunicated Lee, who was arrested in 1874. The cooperation of massacre participant and former Mormon Bishop Philip Klingensmith helped a prosecutor build a strong case against Lee, but a heavily Mormon jury deadlocked. A second jury convicted Lee, and he was executed at Mountain Meadows in March 1877. Before his death, Lee expressed bitterness at what he considered Brigham Young's unjust betrayal, but he never accused his Prophet of ordering the massacre. Other local leaders who helped orchestrate the massacre fled indictments and were not pursued vigorously after Lee's execution. Lee, though certainly guilty himself, became the convenient scapegoat killed for the sins of his brethren.
Two questions comprise the heart of recent studies of Mountain Meadows: Why would a group of Mormon settlers abandon any shred of decency and murder scores of men, women, and children? And who was responsible for the decision to commit the massacre? In particular, did Brigham Young either order or condone the massacre? Juanita Brooks, in her courageous and ground-breaking Mountain Meadows Massacre, identified the long history of Mormon persecution, the frenzy surrounding the army's impending invasion, and the belligerent attitude of the emigrants themselves as factors that led to the mass murder. Although Brooks alleged that Brigham Young and Apostle George A. Smith preached incendiary sermons that "made it possible," they "did not specifically order the massacre." She labeled Young an "accessory after the fact" because of his failure to vigorously investigate the massacre and help bring the perpetrators to justice. (1)
Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, is the most significant book on the subject since Brooks'. Bagley's account sparkles with clear and eloquent writing, contains impressive research on the emigrant train and the role of the Paiute Indians in the attack, and chronicles the church's response to the massacre. Bagley strikes a modest tone at the outset of his work, which he terms "not a revision but an extension of Brooks's labors." Bagley concentrates on the dark elements in early Mormonism and connects them to the massacre. In particular, he emphasizes the doctrine of blood atonement, the early Mormon belief that the only remedy for "unforgivable crimes was to shed one's own blood" or have it shed. According to Bagley, some of the Mormon settlers believed that members of the emigrant train had participated in the recent murder of Mormon Apostle Parley Pratt in Arkansas and possibly had links to earlier anti-Mormon violence in Missouri and Illinois. In their temple ceremony, the Saints swore to "avenge the blood of the prophets," which in Bagley's account they fulfilled at Mountain Meadows.
When he turns to the question of Brigham Young's responsibility for the massacre, Bagley shelves his initial modesty. After the initial fighting on September 7, Isaac Haight—Lee's superior—sent a letter to Young asking for his instructions. Defenders of Young, including Brooks, have pointed to his September 10 response, in which he ordered Haight not to "meddle" with the emigrants. Bagley finds it curious that Young needed to issue such an order and suggests that previously "there were standing orders [from Young] to attack every emigrant party in southern Utah." Drawing on the diary of Dimick Huntingon, Bagley explains that on September 1—ten days before the massacre—Young "gave them [the Paiutes] all the cattle that had gone to Cal on the south rout … they [the Americans] have come to fight us & you for when they kill us they will kill you." "If any court in the American West (excepting, of course, one of Utah's probate courts) had seen the evidence it contains," writes Bagley of Huntington's journal, "the only debate among the jurors would have been when, where, and how high to hang Brigham Young."
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