Month of Atonement
September Dawn and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 05/01/2007
This must be the month of atonement because culpability for ancient and unaddressed sins is the overriding theme of the summer, on TV and in the movies.
It’s no stretch to imagine that the creators of these works mean them to reflect on our current activities as a nation, and in the case of the first film, the role of religious fanaticism as a force in the world.
September Dawn, Christopher Cain’s retelling of the events of 9/11/1857, when a wagon train with fine horses and healthy cattle, en route to California, had the bad luck to cross Mormon territory in Southern Utah without the necessary permission. What occurred that day is today known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the fact that all but a handful of children survived is undisputed. Almost everything else is subject to question.
How many people were involved? Between 100 and 140 victims. Brevet Major James Henry Carleton who investigated the attack two years later seemed to think that the bones and hair found on the site belonged to 120 men, women and children. The stock was long gone.
Where were they from? Primarily Arkansas, though there is some reason to think that a handful of Missourians had at some point joined the party, but whether they were there when the massacre occurred or in fact even existed at all, isn’t clear. What is known is that the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph Smith, was driven out of Missouri when the Mormons tried to fix the state as their home base. They relocated to Illinois, where Smith was killed in his jail cell, in Carthage, in 1844. Yet most cite the murder of church leader Parley Pratt (killed four months earlier in Arkansas) as a key factor behind the massacre.
Who actually killed the settlers? A mixture of Paiutes and Mormons, though what percentage of which, and who committed the worse atrocities depends on which accounts are to be believed. The degree to which the Paiutes were instructed and encouraged by the Mormons is debated.
And now the big question: Who gave the order? Very sticky, that one, because there are those who insist that Brigham Young, the man at the top, pressed the button, which the LDS has denied.
A lot of the information came from the handful of children who survived, but the investigation led to the execution of a single Mormon, John D. Lee, 20 years later in 1877. Before he was killed by firing squad, he renounced the organization and wrote a thoroughly detailed description of the event. The LDS reinstated him in 1961.
The film stars Terence Stamp (General Zod in Superman I and II) as Brigham Young, and Jon Voight as (the fictional) Jacob Samuelson, Young’s patsy. Into the middle of the movie is a plot that involves Samuelson’s son Jonathan (Trent Ford) falling in love with one of the doomed party, Emily (Tamara Hudson), but who is chained to a bed when the horror ensues. (He could have just lifted the bedpost to escape and warn the settlers, but that’s another movie.) Jonathan, by the way, hates his father because Jacob passed his wife, Jonathan’s mother, over to Brigham Young who evidently needed yet another wife.
This picture is scheduled to open on 800 screens in early May, including Salt Lake City, and the Church is already upset, mostly because the orders to kill the party are heard coming from the cool dry lips of Brigham Young, with the appropriate Godfather lighting.
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