Media coverage of the Mountain Meadows Massacre
Media criticism of event in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Although the Mountain Meadows massacre was covered to some extent in the media during the 1850s, its first period of intense nationwide publicity began around 1872. This was after investigators obtained the confession of Philip Klingensmith, a Mormon bishop at the time of the massacre and a private in the Utah militia. National newspapers also covered the John D. Lee trials closely from 1874 to 1876, and his execution in 1877 was widely publicized. The first detailed work using modern historical methods was published in 1950, and the massacre has been the subject of several historical works since that time.
In historical fiction, the massacre inspired a genre of frontier crime fiction in the 19th century. The massacre has been portrayed in several plays, and in a 2007 motion picture, September Dawn. The Massacre has also been of subject of several film documentaries including, Burying the Past: Legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (2004) and The Mountain Meadows Massacre (2001).
Early depictions
One of the earliest depictions of the massacre was written by a massacre participant, John D. Lee, and was entitled Mormonism Unveiled; or the Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee . This Confession was published in 1877, and expressed Lee's opinion that George A. Smith was sent to southern Utah by Brigham Young to direct the massacre.
In 1872, Mark Twain commented on the massacre through the lens of contemporary American public opinion in an appendix to his semi-autobiographical travel book Roughing It.
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This entry incorporates text from “Media coverage of the Mountain Meadows Massacre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.