Fact and fiction behind American Primeval

A popular new Netflix series, American Primeval, is stirring up national interest in a long-forgotten but explosive episode in America’s past. Though the series is highly fictionalized, it is loosely based on events covered in my recent, nonfiction publication, Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath, co-written with Richard E. Turley Jr.

From 1857–58, Mormon settlers of Utah Territory waged a war of resistance against the federal government after the newly elected US president sent troops to occupy the Salt Lake Valley. Concerned about the Mormons’ expanding theocracy in the West—Brigham Young was not only the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but also Utah’s governor—President James Buchanan’s advisors urged him to replace Young with a new governor, accompanied by an army contingent. The occupation of Utah by federal troops, the advisors insisted, was necessary to ensure that Mormons accepted their federally appointed leader.

Though tensions ran extremely hot, remarkably, no pitched battles broke out between the two sides in what became known as the Utah War. But the conflict was anything but bloodless. In the heat of the hysteria, Mormon militiamen in southwest Utah committed a war atrocity, slaughtering a California-bound wagon train of more than a hundred men, women, and children.

Viewers have been asking what is fact and what is fiction in American Primeval’s depiction of the Utah War. Vengeance Is Mine answers those questions. Below are just a few of the answers:

Did the Mormons actually purchase and burn down Fort Bridger?

Yes, though their motivations for doing both were different than those portrayed in the series. They purchased Fort Bridger in 1855—two years before any of the events depicted in the series took place. They bought it to be a trailside way station to supply thousands of immigrant converts making their way to Utah. Mormon militiamen burned down the fort in October 1857, along with the army’s supply wagons and grasses their draft animals needed to survive, all to thwart the advance of the approaching US troops and stall them on the plains of what is now Wyoming.

Did Mormon militiamen really wipe out a contingent of the US Army and a band of Shoshone people?

No. The militiamen’s scorched-earth tactics successfully slowed the troops’ approach until winter snows set in, making trails into the Salt Lake Valley impassable and forcing the troops to spend a miserable winter in a tent city they created outside the burned-out remains of Fort Bridger. When Congress met in early 1858, it rejected President Buchanan’s proposal to raise additional troops to send to Utah and forced Buchanan to broker a peace settlement with Mormon leaders instead. A few years later, in 1863, a different US Army contingent stationed in Utah slaughtered a band of more than four hundred Shoshone people in the Bear River Massacre, in what is southern Idaho today.

Did the Mountain Meadows Massacre take place just outside of Fort Bridger, and did the Shoshone and Southern Paiute live nearby?

No. The Mountain Meadows is in the desert climate of southwestern Utah, several hundred miles south of Fort Bridger. In the series, a band of Shoshone murder a group of Paiute men who had supposedly participated in the massacre in order to kidnap and rape white women. None of this was true. The traditional homelands of the Northwestern Shoshone are in what is today northern Utah and southern Idaho, and the Southern Paiute live in today’s southwestern Utah and Nevada, hundreds of miles apart. The Shoshone and Paiute weren’t at war and rarely, if ever, came in contact with each other. The Southern Paiute did not kidnap and rape women. The massacre was orchestrated by a group of 50-60 Mormon militiamen to cover up their involvement in a cattle raid of the wagon company that went awry. In the war hysteria of 1857, they thought that violence—murdering all the witnesses besides 17 young children—was the answer to protect themselves and their community.

Tragically, the political wrangling and tensions over federal and local rule, separation of church and state, and religious zeal and bigotry, led to a deadly climax on 11 September 1857. Modern readers may recognize similar tensions today, not only in the West but throughout the United States.

_{Featured image by Олег Мороз on Unsplash.}