1857 — The Mountain Meadows Massacre
Southern Utah. A wagon train of 140 is attacked; 120 are killed. The pattern of injuries does not match a musket-armed militia.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 1857 is conventionally attributed to a local Mormon militia operating under orders from LDS leadership. The committee does not contest this attribution. The committee notes that the pattern of injuries sustained by the victims is not consistent with the weapons known to have been in the militia’s possession.
Specifically, the surviving seventeen children of the massacre, when examined by Army surgeons in 1859, exhibited radiation-typical scarring on the unexposed skin of their backs. The Army surgeons’ report, declassified in 1976, describes these scars as “consistent with exposure to intense thermal radiation, but without the associated blast-wave trauma or incendiary burn pattern that would be expected.”
The report was not investigated. No follow-up was filed. The 120 victims were buried in three mass graves that have not been reopened.
The committee is not the first to ask what was at Mountain Meadows that day. We are the first to ask what was buried with them.