Mountain Meadows Massacre

And I think that's worth noting, just like we noted last episode that Brigham Young was, was abused as a child by an abusive father, physically and psychologically, um, not to excuse future, um, misbehavior by Brigham Young, but who among us have witnessed the massacre of our own people? Who of us have been driven out of cities we lived in to become literal refugees with, with young spouses and children? Like, h- h- it, it could only be that Brigham Young was, in many ways, traumatized by what he experienced in Missouri, and that's not even, that's not even counting what later abuse and oppression he experiences in Nauvoo.

So as we think about later his most probably well-known b- bad behavior, which is the Mountain Meadows Massacre sort of behaviors, you know, the behavior surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre, I guess we can only really understand that behavior that we might judge in the context of him literally being a survivor and a refugee of the massacre of his own people.

I think that's a fair observation.

So yeah, the Young family, they perhaps d- they didn't experience the worst.

Mormonism was a significant political issue in the United States as a whole from the mid-1850s, early 1850s, through the early 1900s, so for about half a century, and Brigham Young is just in the middle of that.

This was about the time when there was a lot of renewed attention to the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

It's about the time Will Bagley published his book.

Forget the exact title, but basically Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

I read Leonard Arrington's biography.

One of the things I could perceive from American Moses is that there were a ton, just a ton of very illuminating sources about, especially the last several decades of Brigham Young's life that Arrington and his team had not fully utilized.

And it just tells our story, and it's cathartic, and it helps us.

And he's just written a new play about the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Oh my goodness, I'm reading it now, like a first draft before other people have seen it.

But, you know, and like I mentioned, uh, Brent Boccaloi and his movie, uh, Ronald's Little Factory, um, which won awards at film festivals for hor- It's sort of a horror movie about a missionary the night before he goes into the MTC, and he has the urge to pleasure himself.

I think this goes back to the very founding of the church, whether it's, you know, Joseph didn't have an affair with Fanny Alger, Joseph didn't practice polygamy in Nauvoo.

Uh, you know, Mormons weren't involved in the Mountain Meadows massacre.

Uh, you know, we have stopped polygamy in 1890.

Uh, you know, th- there's just so, so many instances.