The Mormon Menace
The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite
9781465562579
237 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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; 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 escaped. These have been placed in my hands by certain patriotic influences, and are here reprinted as The Mormon Menace. Much that was shocking and atrocious has been eliminated in the editing, as unfit for modest ears and eyes. What remains, however, will give a sufficient picture of the Mormon Church in its hateful attitude towards all that is moral or republican among our people. A black kitten makes a black cat; what the Mormon Church was under President Young it is under President Smith, and will be with their dark successors
