Hamblin was in Salt Lake City at the time of the massacre and returned to his ranch near the massacre site 18 days after the murders to find two child survivors being cared for there by his wife. At Young's request, Hamblin wrote an account of his experiences that month, Reeves said.

Two pages of that journal ended up missing. In 1969 it was given to the church archives. The pages preceding the missing ones tell of his journey to Salt Lake City before the massacre, noting that while there he was invited several times to the office of the First Presidency about "caching, probably caching of grain," Reeves said.

He said the LDS Church history library has another copy of Hamblin's journal from the time, made by clerks in June 1859, with the "two pages also removed from this volume. The missing section logically would have included his experiences in Salt Lake City and the things he learned about the massacre when he met LDS leaders in southern Utah on his way back home," Reeves said.

Images show someone intentionally removed pages from both the original and church's copy of Hamblin's journal. "We're still trying to sort out what happened," he said.

William R. Palmer, who Reeves said was a respected historian and church leader in Cedar City at the time, wrote the minutes of the Cedar City Stake from 1856 to 1859, but "irregularities in the minutes call into question their authenticity." He said problems with dates and alteration of the record occurred a year after the massacre, "likely made at the behest of stake president Isaac Haight or P.K. Smith, both of whom played prominent roles in the massacre."

Early in the record, Palmer signed his name to the minutes, but he "stopped signing the minutes attesting to their veracity during the time of the massacre and following," Reeves said.

John Higbee, who served as town marshal in the area at the time of the massacre and gave the signal to initiate the murders, authored a statement dubbed the "Bull Valley Snort" shortly after the killings, writing under a pseudonym.

When Brooks wrote her book on the massacre, she had access to a copy of his handwritten statement. Although the original "has gone missing," Reeves said, "a facsimile copy has been preserved."

Surviving documents relating to the massacre "form a massive web of conflicting information," he said. "Understanding the history of the sources themselves is a vital tool for arriving at some approximation of historical truth."

During the question and answer session that followed, church history department historian Richard Turley, one of three authors of the forthcoming book on the massacre, said the documents originally denied to Brooks when she wrote her book were available to authors of the new volume.

"We did use those documents at some point in the book, and at some time they will be accessible to you," he said.

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E-mail: carrie@desnews.com