Richard E. Turley

Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott Library Fact, Fiction, and Polygamyrescues an exciting true tale of international intrigue from 150 years of neglect. It tells of the travails of Henrietta Polydore, a young Anglo-Italian girl spirited out of an English Catholic convent school in 1854 and bundled across the Atlantic, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountains by her Mormon-convert mother and aunt to live in Salt Lake City under an alias in the polygamous household of a Latter-day Saint leader with five wives and twenty children. Midway through Henrietta’s secret sojourn in the City of the Saints, she was caught up in the Utah War of 1857–1858, President Buchanan’s attempt to suppress a perceived Mormon rebellion with nearly one-third of the U. S. Army. MacKinnon and Alford present Henrietta’s story through their editing for twenty-first-century readers of a “lost” non-fiction novel about Polydore’s saga published during 1877 in Boston’s Atlantic Monthly. This short piece—dubbed a “novella” and titled The Ward of the Three Guardians—was the work of Albert G. Browne, Jr., a Boston Brahmin with two Harvard degrees and a Ph. D. from the University of Heidelberg, who, at age twenty-three, was in Utah as the war correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. Browne reported on and then became part of Henrietta’s story using his legal training to bring about her repatriation to her father in England through a sensational legal case. Her return home precluded an early, perhaps polygamous, marriage as a teenager. Fact, Fiction, and Polygamy is the work of two historian-editors with disparate backgrounds working collaboratively as professional colleagues as well as personal friends. MacKinnon, an independent historian from upstate New York now living in California, is a Presbyterian, veteran of the U. S. Air Force, and former vice president of General Motors Corporation. Colonel Alford, a Latter-day Saint and Utahn, is a professor teaching at Brigham Young University after a thirty-year career as a U. S. Army officer with teaching assignments at the U. S. Military Academy and National Defense University. MacKinnon and Alford have brought their decades of research on the subject to bear on a re-publication of Ward that helps readers separate Browne’s telling of Henrietta’s story into its strands of fact and fiction. Sit back and savor Albert Browne’s newly recovered tale and its rich blend of fact and fantasy. With the guidance of editors MacKinnon and Alford, determining the difference is half the fun and much the value of revisiting The Ward of the Three Guardians. Number Seventeen in the Series Utah, the Mormons, and the West Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriott Library

The long-awaited follow-up to the groundbreaking Massacre at Mountain Meadows Published in 2008, Massacre at Mountain Meadows was a bombshell of a book, revealing the story of one of the grimmest episodes in Latter-day Saint history, when settlers in southwestern Utah slaughtered more than 100 members of a California-bound wagon train in 1857. In this much-anticipated sequel, Richard E. Turley Jr. and Barbara Jones Brown examine the aftermath of this atrocity. Vengeance Is Mine documents southern Utah leaders' attempts to cover up their crime by silencing witnesses and spreading lies. Investigations by both governmental and church bodies were stymied by stonewalling and political wrangling. While nine men were eventually indicted, five were captured and only one, John D. Lee, was executed. The book examines the maneuvering of the defense and prosecution in Lee's two trials, the second ending in Lee's conviction. Turley and Brown explore the fraught relationship between Lee and church president Brigham Young, and assess what role, if any, Young played in the cover-up. And they trace the fates of the other perpetrators, including the harrowing end of Nephi Johnson, who screamed "Blood! Blood! Blood!" in his delirium as he was dying, more than sixty years after the massacre. Turley and Brown also tell the story of the massacre's few survivors: seventeen children who witnessed the slaughter and eventually returned to Arkansas, where the ill-fated wagon train originated. Vengeance Is Mine brings the hitherto untold story of this shameful episode in Mormon and Utah history to its dramatic conclusion.

Now the subject of a major Netflix documentary by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) titled "Murder Among the Mormons." Updated, refreshed, and republished in this 2021 Anvil & Cross release, the print edition features a newly written AFTERWORD by the author that fills in the more than 30-year gap since its first release. Three pipe bombs exploded in Salt Lake County in 1985, killing two and wounding the assailant. Behind the murders lay a vast forgery scheme aimed at dozens of other victims, most prominently the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mark Hofmann, a master forger, went to prison for the murders. He had bilked the church, document dealers, and collectors of hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years while attempting to alter Mormon history. Other false documents of Americana created by him still circulate today. The crimes garnered intense media interest, spawning books, TV and radio programs, and myriad newspaper and magazine articles. Victims is a thoughtful corrective to the more sensationalized accounts. More important, Richard E. Turley Jr. adds substantially to the record with previously unavailable church documentation and exclusive interviews with church officials, giving this book greater depth and resonance. He also goes beyond the Hofmann case, illustrating how forgeries have hampered the church's efforts to document its own history. Victims includes a complete appendix of every known document the church acquired from Hofmann, reviews of trial transcripts and police reports, as well as dozens of photographs, some never before published. Professional Reviewer"An interesting, fast-paced, well-written account of an important event not only in the history of Mormonism but the history of the acquisition of documents in archives anywhere. Turley focuses on a particular aspect of the Hofmann affair--the church connection--and that, in doing so, he had access to materials that were unavailable to any of the other authors. This book adds to and corrects the historical record." Jan Shipps, author of Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition

On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter. Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping narrative offers fascinating new insight into why Mormons settlers in isolated southern Utah deceived the emigrant party with a promise of safety and then killed the adults and all but seventeen of the youngest children. The book sheds light on factors contributing to the tragic event, including the war hysteria that overcame the Mormons after President James Buchanan dispatched federal troops to Utah Territory to put down a supposed rebellion, the suspicion and conflicts that polarized the perpetrators and victims, and the reminders of attacks on Mormons in earlier settlements in Missouri and Illinois. It also analyzes the influence of Brigham Young's rhetoric and military strategy during the infamous "Utah War" and the role of local Mormon militia leaders in enticing Paiute Indians to join in the attack. Throughout the book, the authors paint finely drawn portraits of the key players in the drama, their backgrounds, personalities, and roles in the unfolding story of misunderstanding, misinformation, indecision, and personal vendettas. The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. Neither a whitewash nor an exposé, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history.

On September 11, 1857, a band of Mormon militia, under a flag of truce, lured unarmed members of a party of emigrants from their fortified encampment and, with their Paiute allies, killed them. More than 120 men, women, and children perished in the slaughter. Massacre at Mountain Meadows offers the most thoroughly researched account of the massacre ever written. Drawn from documents previously not available to scholars and a careful re-reading of traditional sources, this gripping narrative offers fascinating new insight into why Mormons settlers in isolated southern Utah deceived the emigrant party with a promise of safety and then killed the adults and all but seventeen of the youngest children. The book sheds light on factors contributing to the tragic event, including the war hysteria that overcame the Mormons after President James Buchanan dispatched federal troops to Utah Territory to put down a supposed rebellion, the suspicion and conflicts that polarized the perpetrators and victims, and the reminders of attacks on Mormons in earlier settlements in Missouri and Illinois. It also analyzes the influence of Brigham Young's rhetoric and military strategy during the infamous "Utah War" and the role of local Mormon militia leaders in enticing Paiute Indians to join in the attack. Throughout the book, the authors paint finely drawn portraits of the key players in the drama, their backgrounds, personalities, and roles in the unfolding story of misunderstanding, misinformation, indecision, and personal vendettas. The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands as one of the darkest events in Mormon history. Neither a whitewash nor an exposé, Massacre at Mountain Meadows provides the clearest and most accurate account of a key event in American religious history.