Vengeance Is Mine
The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath
Richard E. Turley and Barbara Jones Brown
Reviews and Awards
"This haunting, exhaustively-researched account stands as the definitive study of the long afterlife of the Mountain Meadows massacre." -- Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Washington University in St. Louis
"Vengeance is Mine is a riveting account of how justice was pursued and evaded during an era of national transformation. With moving prose and a brisk narrative, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown's tale reveals much about both nineteenth century Latter-day Saints as well as the American nation against whom they nearly waged war." -- Benjamin E. Park, author of Kingdom of Nauvoo
"A harsh, painful story of the tragic aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre reconstructed from a decades-long investigation of the sources, Vengeance Is Mine is an unflinching account of investigation, cover up, and suffering. Turley and Brown have made startling discoveries that put the story in a new light without relieving the perpetrators of guilt. A complex, enthralling historical narrative." -- Richard Lyman Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling
"This impeccably researched and eloquent book tells a story about crime and punishment in a western territory in the years immediately before and after the Civil War. It is a story about the entanglement of local and national politics, about religious zeal and bigotry, and about barriers to achieving justice in a bitterly polarized society. It is a story for today." -- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870
"In Vengeance Is Mine, Brown and Turley clarify and fill in the narrative spaces in the aftermath of the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre. Using legal transcripts and other primary documents, they unravel the tale of how American Indians were blamed and then used to deflect attention from the principal orchestrators of unimaginable violence. This story reflects events in Mormon history while contextualizing religious and systemic racial attitudes of the nineteenth-century American West. This is a book not to miss." -- P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo), co-editor of Essays on American Indian and Mormon History