Mountain Meadows is newest Natl Landmark

I’m a little befuzzled about how the Church can whole-heartedly commemorate that event. Given their tendencies to focus only on the positive aspects of our history, I’m surprised they are willing to make it a National landmark. I’ve also never received a satisfactory answer about why there was so much mistrust of Mormons wherever they went, leading to reciprocal actions by the LDS people.

I think this is a good thing. Events like MMM should be remembered. My only “complaint” (although that’s a bad word for how I actually feel) is that there is no national monument to the saints who were killed and died prior to and during the move to Utah. MMM didn’t happen in a vacuum, and any national recognition of it is incomplete without something else that remembers the background.

(Oh, and MH, your links in the original comment didn’t take. You need to edit it to include them.)

Silent Dawning, I don’t think the church is “whole-heartedly” endorsing MMM as a monument, but they are “3/4-heartedly” doing it. I think the real pushers were the Fancher relatives, and the church was acquiescing to their wishes.

The church owns the Carthage Jail; I don’t know what value the national government would add to that. The church gets to tell the story of Joseph’s martyrdom in the best light possible–I’m not sure national landmark status would do that. Haun’s Mill would be nice to have something more I think. I’ve only seen it from the film “Trouble in Zion” and it looks pretty sparse.

Ray, it looks like someone fixed the link–it’s working for me.

I have a friend who is a distant relation to the Fancher party, in fact her last name is Fancher. Used to work with her, and one day I asked her opinion of the story…and come to find out their version is a bunch different than ours.

She said their story is they were passing through the area, trying to get to California. The Fancher had a race horse and some prise cows, all of which oh suddenly got stolen. So the men of the party went to see if they could get any justice…which wasn’t going to happen so they wanted to get out of Utah ASAP, cause they felt something bad was going to happen.

thing is she said there were two parties one that skipped Utah, which was mostly family members who weren’t sick or had young kids, they took the longer route and were going to meet up in either California or Arizona with the second party of Fanchers. The first party went through Utah because it was the weaker party, and didn’t want to face Indians, thought the Mormons would be helpful and less of a threat…guess they got that wrong. Plus she said they all knew it wasn’t the Indians and knew it probably had more to do with the race horse than anything.

She did say the family didn’t hold any hard feelings anymore towards the church, but she said most still think Brigham knew about what was going on.

I just completed a search that included all events in US history that are termed massacres for a comment on the Wheat & Tares post about this topic. Based on that search, I think MMM should be a National Landmark – but I also think Winter Quarters should be a National Landmark, along with some of the other massacres on the list I compiled. As horrible as MMM was, FAR more people died at Winter Quarters than at Mountain Meadows (AND any other non-war-related massacre in US history except the Word Trade Center bombings) – and neither MMM nor Winter Quarters should be forgotten, especially is one is commemorated as a National Landmark.