At LDS.org, you can read an article on the Mountain Meadows Massacre to be published in the September 2007 Ensign written by Richard E. Turley Jr., the managing director for the Family and Church History Department.
September 11th marks the 150th anniversary of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Remarkable! Thank you for the heads-up. That is a great article. Does it refer to sources that have previously been unavailable?
I should add that in addition to finding the article itself to be excellent, the idea of the article, i.e. publishing it in the Ensign and discussing the matter so frankly is great.
By the way, I think this is the June Ensign, not the September Ensign, right?
John, thanks for jumpstarting the conversation.
IMO, the Church would need to be very careful about using new sources in for the article…at least sources to which others do not have access. If the article does use previously unavailable documents, the Church would want to immediately allow other historians access and have a frank discussion as to why the sources were previously withheld. In short, using new sources could have negative implications for the Church. Anyone else? Your thoughts?
Here is the text from the LDS.org front page:
I’m anxious to read the article. I found it just before going to bed last night and probably won’t have time to read it until I get home from work.
Great link, Brian. I’m glad to see the publication of this article in the Ensign. It’s a nice follow-up to the article published in a recent issue of the Church News.
IMO, the Church would need to be very careful about using new sources in for the article…at least sources to which others do not have access. If the article does use previously unavailable documents, the Church would want to immediately allow other historians access and have a frank discussion as to why the sources were previously withheld. In short, using new sources could have negative implications for the Church. Anyone else? Your thoughts?
I haven’t seen much of a discussion from the church’s end regarding why certain sources have been unavailable to researchers. For instace, I believe Will Bagley unsuccessfully requested access to the Jenson collection cited in note 5 of Turley’s article.
However, Turley has noted for several years that the church plans to open up sources after the book is published. To quote from a May 2002 article in the Salt Lake Tribune: “[T]he first quasi-official Mormon account has decided advantages over its competitors — namely, access to documents in LDS Church archives off-limits to other scholars.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has the ‘best historical resources for writing about the massacre,’ Richard Turley Jr., managing director of the church’s family and history departments, said Friday. After the book is published, the LDS Church plans to ‘open new sources we have discovered for public use,’ said Turley, one of the book’s authors.
Those sources include government documents, emigrant diaries, newspaper reports, affidavits of men who participated in the massacre and the field notes of Assistant Church Historian Andrew Jenson, who 40 years after the event tried to preserve as much of the historical record as he could. Turley also said other documents and collections will be made available to researchers on computer disks later this year.”
Justin, thanks for the information on the sources. I’m anxious to see how the new sources impact the discussion on the massacre.
For instace, I believe Will Bagley unsuccessfully requested access to the Jenson collection cited in note 5 of Turley’s article.
The Jenson collection is what I was referring to with my question about previously unavailable sources.
Richard Turley will be speaking on “Reflections on Mountain Meadows” at the FAIR Conference which takes place August 2 & 3 in Sandy Utah. You can ask him questions there. More information can be found here: http://www.fairlds.org/conf07a.html
Interesting that Lee’s excommunication was mentioned, but not his posthumous reinstatement.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to note about Turley’s article is that it _doesn’t_ reveal any new scurrilous scandals.
I suspect that Lee’s reinstatement reflected a trend in Church policy towards not questioning any vicarious ordinances a family wants done for their ancestors. I doubt it’s supposed to express an opinion on Lee’s eternal status. I also doubt it will change that status, though I’m not the final judge.
I just got through reading article. It is much like Turley’s lecture that I posted notes about within the last month or two. The main differences are that his lecture 1) went into historical background of militias 2) was arranged more sequentially, so that we learn how Dame initially found about the attack and Haight’s feigning of surprise and 3) was more detailed on how Haight got upset at the uprising in town and how he interpreted actions in terms of mob escalation. The Ensign article has more coverage of the aftermath and provides sources for some information Turley presented. It was nice to see those. Also it clarified to me how much of the death were premeditated in the initial Lee-Haight meeting, that I had a question about.
I should add that in addition to finding the article itself to be excellent, the idea of the article, i.e. publishing it in the Ensign and discussing the matter so frankly is great.
Add to that the fact that the article was made available two months before the release date.