Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows

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	• Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows Will Bagley University of Oklahoma Press, 2004 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Flawed, overwritten "history"

I purchased Blood of the Prophets because I wanted an impartial, detailed book on the Mountain Meadows massacre. I got that -- but I got TOO much of that.

The author crams into his book every possible reference, quotation, or contemporary supposition about the massacre. It's TOO loaded down with detail. Instead of using judicious selection of pertinent details, the author included everything he could find -- which ultimately leaves the reader exasperated, bored or both.

I read over half the book before I'd simply had enough and quit. I may go back and finish it someday, but it's unlikely. The point was made, over and over and over again, that Brigham Young was the "mastermind" behind this disaster, and there are hints that he "might" have been responsible for many more tragedies than the one that is the subject of the book. What those tragedies may have been was not evident, at least through the more-than-half the book I read.

Scholarly writing does NOT have to be boring, and it certainly shouldn't leave the reader with the urge to throw the book across the room, but I have to admit that I came close.

Brigham Young is portrayed, from the very beginning, as the villain responsible for this episode, and he was still the villain when I had had enough. Anyone who writes fiction or nonfiction knows that NO character is wholly good or wholly bad; making that presumption is "author-as-deity", idolizing or condemning without considering any other qualities of the character. But if the author of Blood of the Prophets had anything GOOD to say about Brigham Young, I certainly don't remember what that was. The book is suspect because Young seems to be blamed for anything negative that happens. If I were a Mormon, which I am not, I would likely be angry about much of what is simply inferred about one of the great leaders of the Mormon faith.

Blood of the Prophets sorely needed judicious cutting by a careful, impartial editor. We do not want to read every possible reference to the tragedy; we want selective, impartial, material, gleaned from respectable sources, without having to plow through a glut of more than we really wanted to know -- and a good deal of the references seemed to me to be suspect.

I think the author either badly overwrote, [like I've deliberately done in this review as an attempt to illustrate what reading the book was like for me] or had a specific anti-Mormon agenda to convey to the reader.

If you're absolutely rabid about the subject of the massacre at Mountain Meadows, then I'd tell you to buy the book; if you are reading it to get an impartial view, I'd suggest look elsewhere.

Eating frosting on a cake is certainly pleasurable, but you can get sick if you eat too much frosting. 'Nuff said.

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updates brooks

i found a reference to this in re-reading Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. Juanita Brooks' Mountain Meadows Massacre had been, for me, the bible about these doings. Bagley has gained access to additional information (eg, letters, meeting notes, etc) and fleshes out the context of the ongoing disputes (from the midwest to the west) in a thorough way, giving me a better understanding of both perspectives. It is a more "academic" book than Brooks'; I wouldn't dispense with either.

Just FYI, my interest in this is based on the decade-plus later murder of the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn* in the "wardhouse" in Toquerville, Utah, on the supposition that they were investigating the MM Massacre. I was disappointed that Bagley didn't get into this.

*the Howlands and Dunn had left the Powell expedition through the Grand Canyon.

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Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows

Book is in A-1 condition; arrived earlier than expected. Has the perfect information required for a graduate history class I am taking at Western New Mexico University. Truths finally being told by historians is a welcome sight.
mitchell

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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