Under the banner of heaven: a story of violent faith by Jon Krakauer

Author:Jon Krakauer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Language Arts & Disciplines, LDS, Murder, Religion, True Crime, Journalism, Fundamentalism, Christianity, United States, Murder - General, Christianity - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saomts (, General, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), Christianity - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon), Religion - Mormon, United States - 20th Century (1945 to 2000), Christianity - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (, Mormon fundamentalism, History
ISBN: 9781400032808
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2004-06-07T07:00:00+00:00

Conceding the inevitable, Brigham adopted a pragmatic new strategy that was as brilliant as it was callous. He stopped claiming that the Indians were responsible for the massacre and decided to blame the whole thing on Lee, offering up his adopted son as a scapegoat.

Lee was put on trial a second time in 1876. On this occasion the LDS First Presidency carefully screened the jurors, all Mormons, to ensure that Lee, and Lee alone, would be convicted. Jacob Hamblin, who had been far from the Mountain Meadow when the killing took place, proved to be the star witness for the prosecution; his convincing, if perjured, testimony of Lee’s savagery sealed the latter’s fate. “So carefully had the questions been placed,” wrote Juanita Brooks, “so patient and delicate had the lawyers been with the witnesses, that the combined sins of all the fifty men who were present were laid on the shoulders of John D. Lee.” On September 20, after considering the witnesses and evidence that Brigham had very selectively provided to the prosecution, Brigham’s jury found Lee guilty of first-degree murder.

The court sentenced Lee to die, thereby satisfying Gentile America’s demand for justice, or at least the appearance thereof. “Someone had to be sacrificed,” one of the jurors admitted afterward, alluding to the passage from The Book of Mormon in which Nephi slays Laban (the same passage that had inspired Dan Lafferty to kill): “Better for one man to die than for a whole nation to dwindle in unbelief.”

In prison, awaiting execution, Lee used the time remaining to him to pen his life story, which was published posthumously under the title Mormonism Unveiled, and became a national best-seller. At the conclusion of his book Lee wrote,

I was guided in all that I did which is called criminal, by the orders of the leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have never knowingly disobeyed the orders of the Church since I joined it at Far West, Missouri, until I was deserted by Brigham Young and his slaves.

On the morning of March 23, 1877, under the watchful eye of his guards, Lee stepped out of a carriage onto the sandy loam of the Mountain Meadow, the first time he had returned to the site of the massacre in twenty years. The condemned man completed his will, sat down on the coffin that would shortly hold his corpse, and listened to a marshal make a formal recitation of his death warrant. Then he stood and calmly addressed the crowd of some eighty people who had traveled to the meadow to watch him die. “A victim must be had, and I am the victim,” Lee declared with a mix of resignation and accusation. “I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner.”

After Lee finished speaking, the marshal tied a blindfold across his eyes, and Lee sat down again on the edge of the open coffin, imploring of the firing squad, “Let them shoot the balls through my heart! Don’t let them mangle my body.

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