APTER XX - THE MUSTER OF THE DANITES . . . . . . . . . . .146

CHAPTER XXI - THE BLOOD FEAST OF THE DANITES . . . . . . . .151

CHAPTER XXII - THE DANITE CHIEF REPORTS TO BRIGHAM . . . . .157

CHAPTER XXIII - LEE NEARS THE END. . . . . . . . . . . . . .161

APPENDIX I - BLOOD ATONEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166

APPENDIX II - THE STORY OF LEE'S ARREST. . . . . . . . . . .168

APPENDIX III - DEATH OF JOHN DOYLE LEE . . . . . . . . . . .173

ILLUSTRATIONS (not included in text version)

The Mountain Meadows ii

The Danite 36

The Mormon Preacher 60

The Blood Atonement 138

John Doyle Lee 150

INTRODUCTION

THE MORMON PURPOSE

Almost a half century ago, being in 1857, John Doyle Lee, a chief
among that red brotherhood, the Danites, was ordered by Brigham
Young and the leading counselors of the Mormon Church to take his
men and murder a party of emigrants then on their way through
Utah to California. The Mormon orders were to "kill all who can
talk," and, in their carrying out, Lee and his Danites, with
certain Indians whom he had recruited in the name of scalps and
pillage, slaughtered over one hundred and twenty men, women, and
children, and left their stripped bodies to the elements and the
wolves. This wholesale murder was given the title of "The
Mountain Meadows Massacre." Twenty years later, in 1877, the
belated justice of this Government seated Lee on his coffin, and
shot him to death for his crimes.

In those long prison weeks which fell in between his arrest and
execution, Lee wrote his life, giving among other matters the
story of the Church of Mormon from its inception, when Joseph
Smith pretended, with the aid of Urim and Thummim, to translate
the golden plates, down to those murders for which he, Lee, was
executed. Lee's confessions, so to call them, were published
within a few months following his death. The disclosures were
such that the Mormon Church became alarmed; the book might mean
its downfall. In the name of Mormon safety Brigham Young, by
money and other agencies, succeeded in the book's suppression.
What copies had been sold were, as much as might be, bought up
and destroyed, together with the plates and forms from which they
had been printed.

In the destruction of this literature, so perilous to Mormons, at
least two volumes e