This massacre is probably the reason Arthur Conan Doyle cast the Mormons as villains in A Study in Scarlet.
--- On Mon, 4/13/09, MICHAEL YATES <mikedjyates at msn.com> wrote:
John D. Lee, the man who ran the
> ferry across the Colorado River, was a Mormon pioneer,
> ordered, in 1871, by the Latter Day Saints to establish it.
> Fourteen years earlier, Lee had participated in the Mountain
> Meadows Massacre, in which Mormon militiamen murdered more
> than one hundred men, women, and children, who were
> migrating west from Arkansas. The Mormons spared the
> children under eight and doled them out to Mormon families.
> They tried to paint the slaughter as the work of Indians,
> but eventually government investigation showed otherwise.
> Remarkably, only John D. Lee was tried before a court. He
> was found guilty and was shot by firing squad at the site of
> the massacre. Although Mormons keep their history alive, and
> you feel its presence, they kept this horrible event out of
> their remembrances.
>
>
>
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