I was researching this event a bit online, and apparently this reading is controversial. First, the perpetrators were not just Mormons, but a mixed group of Mormons and Paiute Indian allies. Second, it is unknown whether John Lee actually ordered the massacre. For what little an hour of Internet research is worth.
--- On Tue, 4/14/09, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Mormon country
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 2:47 AM
>
> 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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> >
>
>
>
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