Your annual reminder of the Mountain Meadows Massacre September 9, 2020
Jon Krakauer reddit.com/r/atheism
Your annual reminder of the Mountain Meadows Massacre - on this day in 1857 Mormons attacked, captured, and murdered at point-blank range an estimated 120 innocent pioneers traveling from Arkansas to California. Among the killed were 50 children.

From Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven:

Out of the entire Fancher wagon train, only seventeen lives were spared — all of them children no more than five years old, deemed too young to remember enough to bear witness against the [Mormons].

Those children not killed were taken to Mormon homes to be raised as Latter-day Saints; some were placed in households of the very men who had murdered their parents and siblings. In 1859 an agent of the federal government managed to find all seventeen survivors and return them to their Arkansas kin, but before handing the kids over, their Mormon keepers had the audacity to demand thousands of dollars in payment for feeding and schooling the youngsters while they were in the [Mormons'] care.

The Mormons had convinced a contingent of Southern Paiute Indian warriors to accompany them on the raid, painting their own white faces dark to look like their Paiute accomplices in an attempt to avoid blame. From Krakauer:

The Mormon militiamen, [Mormon military leader John D.] Lee reported, "piled the dead bodies up in heaps, in little gullies, and threw dirt over them. The bodies were only lightly covered, for the ground was hard, and the brethren did not have sufficient tools to dig with." Within days, wolves and other scavengers had scattered their remains across the meadow.

Upon completion of this halfhearted, hastily undertaken burial, according to Lee, the [Mormons] gathered in a circle at the site of the mass murder to offer "thanks to God for delivering our enemies into our hands." Then the overseers of the massacre reiterated "the necessity of always saying the Indians did it alone, and that the Mormons had nothing to do with it...It was voted unanimously that any man who should divulge the secret, or tell who was present, or do anything that would lead to a discovery of the truth, should suffer death."

Further reading for those interested:

https://www.britannica.com/event/Mountain-Meadows-massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre

https://www.amazon.com/Under-Banner-Heaven-Story-Violent/dp/1400032806

https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Meadows-Massacre-Juanita-Brooks/dp/0806123184

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