Free Oh What a Slaughter by Larry McMurtry

damage, to free themselves from the coils of the court, they often contradicted themselves wildly; many soon lost track of what they knew and what they believed.
    This time John Doyle Lee was speedily convicted and sentenced to death. He was allowed to choose the method of hisown execution and he chose to be shot—in 1877, at the massacre site, he was killed by a firing squad.
    John Doyle Lee spent his last days either cursing the Mormon church, or confessing, which he did four times, in wild spewings that contained many contradictions. Dunn dryly observes of the second trial that the jury that finally convicted Lee had no more right to sit in judgment of him than had the sultan of Turkey. He was killed by his own people, all of them hoping to save themselves.
    Brigham Young, a man who kept many secrets, died peacefully a few weeks later.
    J. P. Dunn ends his long account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre with this vivid splash of color:
    The Mormons were right in their superstition that a Nemesis stands, ever threatening them, on the mountains of southern Utah. She does stand there, and in her outstretched hands, for the ash branch and the scourge, she holds a curse over the doomed theocracy, while from her ghastly lips comes the murmur of those words which no prophet can still: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” saith the Lord.
    The theocracy was not doomed—it prospers today, but I would have to agree that Nemesis still broods over that massacre site, particularly in the area of the monument they can never get right. In attempting to pretty up the monument site a backhoe operator uncovered a mass grave, the very last thing the Mormons would have wanted to happen. But when it did happen they proceeded to remake laws in order to get the bones backinto the ground before the forensic team could do its work, which only makes them seem the more guilty.
    Nemesis may not depart, either, unless the Mormon church can somehow bring itself to be honest about Mountain Meadows, and that day has clearly not arrived.
    Probably some of the Mormons who put on war paint and slaughtered immigrants did suffer agonies of remorse. Killing people is no light task. But if some few wasted away, quite a number seemed to live with the crime well enough, their discomfort level only increasing during the second trial of John Lee, when many of them had to abruptly change positions that they had been defending for twenty years.
    John Doyle Lee had every right to be outraged at the church and the colleagues who sacrificed him. Yet he himself had wiped blood off his hands that day, helped himself to some of the cattle and some of the loot, and lived serenely as a prosperous farmer, for twenty years a well-respected man.
    He took the massacre in stride, and so did many of his co-participants. Many of them felt genuinely indignant when they were finally linked to this crime they had committed so long ago. Some may have convinced themselves that they were off hoeing corn that day. A lie sustained for twenty years can come to seem like the truth.
    Utah is a state with many fabulous beauty spots: Mountain Meadows is not one of them. It is a long way from anywhere. The monument—perhaps I should say the most recent monument, for who knows what Nemesis will yet wring out of the Mormons?—at least has the names of the victims on it. And yet this monument put up to honor the victims merely insults them yet again in its half-honesty. There are the names of the victims—where are the names of the killers? Unlike the fine memorial plaque at Wounded Knee, the Mountain Meadows monumentleaves a bad taste in the mouth. In southern Utah dishonesty still rules; Nemesis is not yet satisfied. The simple cross that Major Carleton put up to begin with would have served mourners better than the present showy fraud.
    The Mormons’ final argument, once it had been proven by the testimony of Lee, Klingensmith, and others that they had participated in