The new book "Massacre at Mountain Meadows," published Thursday by Oxford University Press, brgins with these words:

"On September 11, 1857, Mormon settlers in southern Utah used a false flag of truce to lull a group of California-bound emigrants from their circled wagons and then slaughter them. When the killing was over, more than one hundred butchered bodies lay strewn across a half-mile stretch of upland meadow. Most of the victims were women and children."

Those stark, unsparing lines might not be the very first thing that many would expect to read in an account written by Mormons, or members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of perhaps the most infamous occurrence in the 160-year history of Utah as a U.S. possession, territory and state.

"Massacre at Mountain Meadows" is a collaboration between historians Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard. All three men are Latter-day Saints. Walker, 68, is an independent historian; Leonard, 69, is the former director of the LDS Church's Museum of Church History and Art; and Turley, 52, is Assistant Church Historian under LDS general authority Elder Marlin K. Jensen. That means that the new book, while not published by the LDS Church, has an authoritative LDS voice.

All three men have for years had a private interest in the event known to history as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The tragedy unfolded several miles south and west of Cedar City on a site where a wagon train led by Alexander Fancher and John T. Baker had encamped in an open meadow.

In the weeks prior to the massacre, the settlers, most of them from Arkansas, had become the object of enmity and suspicion among Utah's Mormon population, which had spent much of 1857 in fearful anticipation of the arrival of federal troops sent by President James Buchanan to defuse what Washington, D.C., perceived to be a Mormon uprising.

Fancher and Baker's party was attacked on Sept. 7 by Mormon militia and Paiute Indian tribesmen, kept pinned down over the next four days, and eventually lured to their deaths. At least 120 were murdered, according to most counts, while 17 of the youngest children were spared.

The tragic story has been examined before. The groundbreaking volume "Mountain Meadows Massacre," written by Latter-day Saint and respected historian Juanita Brooks, was published in 1950.

In recent years, historian and Utah native Will Bagley gave another history of the massacre in "Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows" (2002), while mountaineer and essayist Jon Krakauer explored the bloody events in his book "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith" (2003) about the 1984 murders committed by brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty.

In 2004, University of Utah film professor Brian Patrick attracted praise for crafting a sober, thoughtful retelling of Mountain Meadows in his documentary film "Burying the Past: Legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre," while Hollywood filmmaker Christopher Cain was widely ridiculed in 2006 for his lurid, fictionalized account "September Dawn." (Some people, apparently, are still laughing -- the performance of actor Jon Voight in Cain's film is the butt of a lightning-fast visual joke in the new movie "Tropic Thunder.")

The collaboration by Walker, Turley and Leonard is unique in the breadth of the research that supports it. Nearly half of the book's 430 pages are taken up by its notes and appendices. An eight-page "Acknowledgements" section credits dozens of collaborators spread across the country with helping to research and refine the manuscript at some point in the nearly seven years since it was conceived.

"This book rests on the most thorough research on the Mountain Meadows Massacre that's ever been conducted," Turley said. "We've done research from the northeast to southern California, from the Pacific Northwest to the southeast."

Jan Shipps, professor emeritus of religious studies and history at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and a widely respected authority on Mormonism, agreed with Turley's assessment. "There is documentation on top of documentation on top of documentation, and that we haven't had before," Shipps said. "It's probably the most documented work of any in Utah history."

The authors worked with descendants of the massacre survivors, inviting some to read their manuscript and provide feedback prior to publication. There are three principal groups that advocate on behalf of survivor descendants: the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation, Mountain Meadows Descendants and the Mountain Meadows Association. (The Mountain Meadows Association also includes descendants of the massacre's perpetrators.)

Some descendants have actively petitioned LDS officials to turn control of the massacre site, which the church owns, over to the federal government. Others have collaborated with LDS officials in efforts to memorialize the massacre and its victims.

In March, Jensen, the incumbent LDS Church historian, met with representatives of the three major descendant groups to announce that church officials will seek to have the massacre site designated a National Historic Landmark. The church has also purchased 600 acres of land surrounding the site to preserve it as open space. Jensen told descendant groups that, "The land will be left undeveloped to preserve the sanctity of that hallowed area and out of respect for those who died there."

Terry Fancher, president of the Mountain Meadows Association and a descendant of Alexander Fancher, said that he's just begun to read "Massacre at Mountain Meadows," but that he, too, is impressed by the level of research.

"I always look for the footnotes and the endnotes to see what the sources of information are," Fancher said.

Fancher said that he's pleased to see that many documents from the period of the massacre, such as journals and court transcripts, were consulted. He said that he hasn't read anything else written by Walker or Leonard, but that he has a good opinion of Turley based on Turley's book "Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hoffman Case." Turley, Fancher said, "did a bang-up job on ["Victims"] getting the facts right."

Fancher's hope is that, as more documents from the period emerge, there may eventually be a complete list of the names of those who were killed. Appendix A to "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" lists the names of nearly 90 persons "known or strongly believed to have perished" in the massacre.

¬ A Latter-day Saint version of events?

Because retelling history requires a level of conjecture, the authors anticipated a degree of skepticism regarding the conclusions drawn by sympathetic Latter-day Saints about a Latter-day Saint atrocity. Some historians, for example, argue that Brigham Young is to blame for the massacre and may even secretly have ordered it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" finds the revered LDS leader guilty of inflammatory rhetoric in the weeks leading up to the massacre, as U.S. troops marched to Utah, but clears him of any direct involvement.¬  "At the local level," Leonard said, "we found sufficient evidence to convince us that the planning took place in the Cedar City area" and plans were enacted by local LDS authorities.

The book ascribes most of the responsibility for planning and carrying out the killings to members of the Iron Military District of the territorial militia. Isaac C. Haight, a militia major as well as being mayor of Cedar City and president of the Cedar City Stake (LDS stakes are geographical units made up of several wards, or congregations), is shown to have played a key role. So is John D. Lee, a militia major and federal Indian agent, and the only person eventually convicted and executed for participating in the massacre.

After the party led by Fancher and Baker had been detained and attacked, the book says, Haight sent an urgent letter to Young seeking his counsel. Young's equally urgent reply, directing that the emigrants be allowed to "go in peace," arrived on Sept. 13 -- two days too late.

Walker said that the answer to criticism of the new book's historical objectivity will ultimately be determined only by passage of time. "If you do your job, whatever your background, whatever your deep feelings and sympathies might be," he said, "then the book will hold up."

Shipps said that even people who are tempted to dismiss an LDS account of the massacre out of hand will be forced to consider the research. She estimated that LDS Church officials may have spent as much as $1 million subsidizing the book (with much of that figure representing salaries paid to church employees who participated in gathering research).

"I think that it was President [Gordon B.] Hinckley," she said, referring to the longtime LDS Church president who died in January, "who realized that they had to do this, that it had to be faced."

In the final years of his life, Hinckley directed LDS efforts to honor the memory of the massacre victims, in particular the 1999 restoration of a monument at the site of the massacre originally erected by U.S. soldiers.

At the dedication of the restored monument on Sept. 11, 1999, Hinckley described a long-ago visit to the site with his then 85-year-old father: "There was no one else around. My father said nothing. I said nothing. We simply stood here and thought of what occurred here in 1857. The rock cairn was here. Weeds rustled in the breeze. We walked back to our car without speaking. We knew this ground was hallowed, and we were reverent and respectful."

Hinckley also included a plea for closure in his remarks, saying, "All who knew firsthand about what occurred here are long since gone. Let the book of the past be closed. Let peace come into our hearts."

Walker, Turley and Leonard readily disclose that church leadership supported their quest. In the preface to "Massacre at Mountain Meadows," they state that their search for documentation extended to "the church's history library and archives, as well as the archives of the First Presidency, the church's highest governing body. Church leaders supported our book by providing full and open disclosure."

(The archives of the First Presidency are a special collection maintained by the church president and his counselors. In "Victims," Turley describes the First Presidency's "vault" as being "a small but secure room in the Church Administration Building that housed records of the First Presidency, as well as a small collection of historical records and artifacts, most of which came into the First Presidency's possession when Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., long-time church historian, became president in 1970.")

Church support of the book was made public last year at a memorial ceremony observing the 150th anniversary of the massacre, when then-LDS apostle Elder Henry B. Eyring (currently first counselor in the First Presidency to President Thomas S. Monson), speaking on behalf of the First Presidency, said, "We believe it is our obligation to understand and learn from the past. For this reason, the church responded favorably several years ago to the request of three experienced and able historians, Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard, to cooperate with their researching of a book about the awful event that occurred here a century and a half ago.

"The book they are writing is nearly complete and will be published in coming months by Oxford University Press under the title 'Massacre at Mountain Meadows.' "

Eyring also said that the authors had been given "full access to all relevant materials held by the Church."

(One result of the unprecedented access was the key discovery of a large collection of eyewitness testimony about the massacre gathered by former Assistant Church Historian Andrew Jenson in 1892, following instructions from the then-First Presidency of church president Lorenzo Snow and counselors George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith.)

Turley said that church officials, however, did not attempt to dictate the book's content. The authors were assured of full editorial control and have assumed full authorial responsibility, a position confirmed by church spokesman Scott Trotter, who said, "The authors have accurately stated that this is not a formal Church account and that they [the authors] are solely responsible for the content and conclusions in the book."

Piecing together the evidence

Those conclusions were not always readily agreed upon, Turley said -- by design. "We wanted disagreements," he said. "We had weekly meetings in which we would discuss our interpretation. I thought that was one of the strengths of the collaboration, that we were able to challenge each other."

Leonard said that, over the years of research, the authors frequently revised their interpretations. "We were all the time renegotiating the common understanding," he said.

Preparing the exhaustive documentation praised by Shipps was a far-from-simple process, especially given that the authors were inquiring about an event 150 years in the past. In reconstructing the events of the massacre, as well as the events and circumstances leading up to it, Leonard said that a major goal was to find firsthand accounts, reports from eyewitnesses. "Even then," he said, "you know that two or three witnesses can see things differently."

Hence, it was also important to check accounts against each other. "We tried to corroborate every detail," Leonard said, "to have at least two sources in every case." Wherever no firsthand source could be found, the next step was to find sources as close to the place and time of events in question as possible.

One complication, Turley said, is that the observers of an event, and also their observations, often become widely dispersed. An analogous situation, he said, might be encountered by someone investigating the "Miracle Bowl" football game between Brigham Young University and Southern Methodist University in 1980.

"If you were to try to collect all of the journals of all of the people who saw that game in the stadium," Turley said -- BYU fans, SMU fans, the officiating crew, the players and coaches from both teams, journalists, bowl officials -- "think of all the places you'd have to go."

And that's only taking into account records that have been preserved. There are at least two areas in which many firsthand accounts simply no longer exist. "One of the great challenges," Turley said, "is that, unlike with many other areas of Latter-day Saint history, where the historical fabric is very rich, here we had this huge tear, or hole." Instead of the wealth of personal journals common to almost every other realm of Latter-day Saint history, the researchers often found ... nothing.

"The people who participated in the massacre became ashamed of their participation and destroyed evidence," Turley said. "Or, if they didn't, their family members often did."

Another frustration, Walker said, was in "getting the Native American point of view." That is to say, telling the story of the Paiute Indian tribesmen who participated in the killing at the urging of Mormon militia, and for many years bore the stigma of being named the massacre's primary instigators. Since the Paiute people at the time of the massacre primarily preserved their history only as spoken stories, there were severe limitations.

"We did our best," Walker said. "We scoured oral histories. We tried to find the Indian point of view in records from the white man's culture." Many of the oral histories that could have contributed to the authors' understanding, however, either were never told or have been forgotten.

Where no amount of research could fill in the gaps, the authors were left to engage in what fellow historian Richard Bushman, author of the landmark biography of LDS Church founder Joseph Smith "Rough Stone Rolling," said is "the historian's art."

You look at all of the available evidence, he said, and then link the facts together into a narrative. "You have to be both imaginative and restrained," Bushman said.

The writing of "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" might not have been possible 20 or 30 years ago, but Bushman, who is LDS, said he thinks the LDS Church has embarked on an era of greater openness.

"The first article I published on Joseph Smith in a church magazine," he said, "they insisted that all his spelling mistakes be corrected." The magazine's editors didn't want Smith to seem illiterate.

"Now," Bushman said, "the Joseph Smith papers are being printed" exactly as originally written by Smith and his scribes, mistakes and all.

Even so, Bushman acknowledged that some readers may not want to accept the new book. But because it's been so thoroughly researched, he said, and tells the story so well, only people with a "deep suspicion that nothing coming out of the church historian's office is trustworthy" are likely to reject it out of hand.

(Whether it is ultimately accepted or rejected, the book is already a strong seller.¬ Christian Purdy, director of publicity for Oxford University Press, confirmed via e-mail that the book has sold out its entire first printing, and a second printing is underway. "We are encouraged by the response from readers to date and want to assure stores and customers alike that more books are on the way," Purdy said.)

In the end, all three authors hope that their work to resurrect a terrible tragedy will have positive outcomes. "The book really is a primer about how men and women might live their lives," Walker said. "We hope that the story of the massacre will reach right into the essentials of human conduct."

Leonard hopes that readers will understand, or at least empathize with, the emotions of fear, suspicion and anger -- fueled by a history of religious persecution and the knowledge that U.S. government soldiers were marching to Utah to remove the territory's LDS legislators from power -- that led the militia men to act against the emigrants.

He said that he also hopes the book will eventually help to ease decades of lingering grief, resentment and shame. "We have written with candor and openness," he said, "and we hope that will have a healing effect."

Cody Clark can be reached at 344-2542 or cclark@heraldextra.com.

"Massacre at Mountain Meadows"

Authors: Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Glen M. Leonard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Date of publication: Aug. 14, 2008

Length: 430 pages

If you go

"Massacre at Mountain Meadows" -- Meet One of the Authors

What: Assistant Church Historian Richard E. Turley of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of three authors of the new book "Massacre at Mountain Meadows," will address the monthly meeting of the Utah Valley Historical Society.

Where: Young Special Events Room (Room 201), Provo City Library, 550 N. University Ave., Provo

When: 7 p.m. on Sept. 9

Cost: Free