Mountain Meadows book flying off shelves

The new book "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" by Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard has been a surprise best seller despite its downbeat, somewhat obscure topic, 430-page length and $29.95 price tag. Publisher Oxford University Press sold out its first printing by the date of publication, Aug. 14, and rushed a larger second printing to booksellers.

On Tuesday, OUP publicists issued a release announcing that the second printing had also sold out. A third printing is now in the works. "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" examines events that befell the week of Sept. 7-11, 1857, when men belonging to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attacked and detained settlers traveling from Arknasas to California at a site west and south of Cedar City. On Sept. 11, 1857, about 120 settlers, all of the adults and older children still alive, were lured from their wagons by a flag of truce and then shot and killed en masse.

Turley is Assistant Church Historian of the LDS Church, and Walker and Leonard are both also Latter-day Saints. The authors had unprecedented access to LDS Church historical archives and conducted a massive search across the United States to find and examine other documents pertaining to the massacre.

-- Cody ClarkSClB