Southern Utah · September 1857
The Mountain Meadows Massacre
An emigrant wagon train bound for California was attacked and roughly 120 men, women, and older children were killed in a mountain valley near present-day Enterprise.
The Baker–Fancher party left Arkansas in the spring of 1857 for California. They passed through Utah Territory during the tense weeks of the Utah War, when federal troops were marching toward the territory and rumor traveled faster than fact.
The wagon train was besieged at Mountain Meadows for several days. On September 11, 1857, members of the local militia, some disguised and some accompanied by Paiute men, approached under a flag of truce, persuaded the emigrants to give up their weapons, and then killed them. Seventeen young children were spared.
The killings were concealed for years. John D. Lee was eventually tried and executed in 1877. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has since issued formal expressions of regret, and the site is preserved as a memorial.
The novel does not sensationalize the massacre. It sits in the book the way it sat in southern Utah for a generation: as something the families lived near, heard about in pieces, and did not talk about plainly.