Mountain Meadows Massacre and Mormon theology
Two of the southernmost establishments were Parowan and Cedar City, led respectively by Stake Presidents William H. Dame and Isaac C. Haight.
A decade prior the Baker–Fancher party's arrival, Mormons had established in the Utah Territory a theocratic community (see theodemocracy), where Brigham Young presided over the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as LDS Church president and Prophet of God,[1] until Christ's assumption of world kingship at his Second Coming.
[2] U.S. President Millard Fillmore appointed Young as governor of the Territory of Utah[3] and its Superintendent of Indian Affairs, but there was minimal effective separation between church and state until 1858.
[4] Brigham Young envisioned a Mormon domain, called the State of Deseret, spanning from the Salt Lake Valley to the Pacific Ocean[5] and so he sent church leaders to establish colonies far and wide.
The colonies were governed by Mormon officials under Young's mandate to enforce "God's law" by "lay[ing] the ax at the root of the tree of sin and iniquity" and preserving individual rights.
[6] Despite the distance to these outlying colonies, local Mormon leaders received frequent visits from church headquarters, and were under Young's direct doctrinal and political control.
"[16] Whatever the case, there is a consensus that William H. Dame and Isaac C. Haight, the two most senior local church leaders in southern Utah to be complicit in the massacre, took the rhetoric of such doctrines seriously as they contemplated sanctionable applications of violence.
[20] Historian Leonard Arrington attributes these rumors to the actions of "Minute Men," a law enforcement organization created by Young to pursue hostile Indians and criminals.
[23] At the time of the massacre, Mormons had an acute memory of recent persecutions against them, particularly the death of their prophets, and had been taught that God would soon exact vengeance.
[30] As a result of this oath, several Mormon apostles and other leaders considered it their religious duty to kill the prophets' murderers if they ever came across them.
[33] Col. William H. Dame, the ranking officer in southern Utah who ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre, received a patriarchal blessing in 1854 that he would "be called to act at the head of a portion of thy Brethren and of the Lamanites (Native Americans) in the redemption of Zion and the avenging of the blood of the prophets upon them that dwell on the earth.
This route put emigrants at risk of becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California as the Donner party had done ten years before.
[37] At least one couple, Henry D. and Malinda Cameron Scott, chose to take the Northern route while others from the woman's family went south with the united parties under Captain Fancher.
