Ugly deeds not easily explained

Bad news travels fast, so the saying goes, and it never seems to go away, either.

Consider the event known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, an ugly — most would say the ugliest — part of Mormon history that saw several dozen Mormon militiamen, joined by Paiute Indians, execute about 120 members of an emigrant wagon train in the mountains northwest of present-day St. George nearly 150 years ago in 1857.

The massacre was so aberrational — millions of Mormons before and after have been anything but mass murderers — that generation after generation has agonized over trying to figure it out. How could turn-the-other-cheek Christians, people who fled to the void of the American West to get away from conflict, depart so far from their tenets?

The latest attempt at understanding it all, and what could prove to be the most complete, is headed to the presses as we speak. As was announced last month, "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" is due to be released sometime next year by Oxford University Press. Written by historians Richard E. Turley Jr., Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard, the book combines years of research by the three authors.

Comments Turley has made suggest this is no sugar-coated treatment. Murder is called murder. In an article in the LDS magazine The Ensign, Turley states soberly: "Two facts make the case even more difficult to fathom. First, nothing that any of the emigrants purportedly did or said, even if all of it were true, came close to justifying their deaths. Second, the large majority of perpetrators led decent, nonviolent lives before and after the massacre."

Small wonder that the atrocity has been so troubling for so long, or that Turley should add, "As is true with any historical episode, comprehending the events of September 11, 1857, requires understanding the conditions of the time."

As it happened, the announcement of the forthcoming publication of "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" coincided with my reading of another book that deals with wanton killing. "An Ordinary Man" is an autobiography written by Paul Rusesabagina that was published last year.

Rusesabagina was the hotel manager in Kilgali, Rwanda, who sheltered more than 1,200 refugees and saved them from the slaughter in 1994 that claimed the lives of more than 800,000 Rwandans. Besides the book, his actions inspired the Hollywood movie "Hotel Rwanda."