The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero
Jerry O'Brien was publisher of the Tribune when Jay Shelledy arrived. O'Brien, in the tradition of Tribune publishers, was a Catholic and was a veteran newsman. Unlike Jack Gallivan, he was also somewhat shy. He had come to the Tribune after serving as an Associated Press bureau chief. O'Brien gave Shelledy a free hand, and the Tribune began reporting aggressively on the church.
In 2000, Chris Smith, one of his reporters, discovered a story that led from the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 directly to the door of the modern Mormon Church. It started with an archeological dig at the site of the massacre. It opened old wounds and infuriated officials of the church. Shelledy directed that the story run in three installments (see the appendix to read the full articles). Before publishing, Shelledy invited a representative of the LDS Church to read a sample of the series. The church representative arrived, “saw the thrust and went away.”1 The first installment hit Salt Lake City doorsteps and newsstands early on Sunday, March 12, 2000. The headline read the following:2
Bones of Contention:
Unearthing Mountain Meadow Secrets: Backhoe at S. Utah Killing Field Rips Open 142-year-old Wound
Smith's first installment told of the desire in 1999 of the LDS Church president Gordon Hinckley, and descendants of the victims of the Mountain Meadows slaughter, to build a new monument to the 120 Arkansans who died at Mountain Meadows. The dedication would occur on September 11, 1999.
On August 3, 1999, a backhoe operator from Brigham Young University was excavating for the monument when he unearthed the remains of twenty-nine of the 120 Fancher party emigrants killed in 1857.
The Tribune article also reported that, initially, the LDS Church and Ron Loving, president of the Mountain Meadows Association (MMA), hoped to prevent the public from knowing anything about what was found. However, a faction of the descendants of the victims, led by Burr Fancher, suspected Loving was working with the church to “sanitize a foul deed.”
There was a third group, the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation, headed by Scott Fancher, who said, “What we understood in every correspondence, and we thought we had made perfectly clear to the church, was that under no circumstances would the remains be disturbed.” Meanwhile, Brigham Young University's staff archeologist, Shane Baker, explained that in spite of ground-reading radar and other tests, the site where the thirty pounds of bones were excavated was somehow overlooked. The man on the backhoe felt he had no choice but to bring the bones to the attention of authorities.
The Utah State archeologist, Kevin Jones, hearing of the find, informed BYU that Utah law required a basic scientific analysis when human remains are discovered on private property. Failure to comply was a felony.
Tribune reporter Chris Smith wrote that BYU's Baker transferred the remains to the University of Utah's forensic anthropology lab in Salt Lake City, “which BYU had subcontracted to do the required ‘osteological’ analysis.”
Loving, vowing to keep things quiet, managed to get Governor Mike Leavitt to order the bones transferred—over the objections of the state archeologist—back to Baker at BYU.
The governor “did not feel that it was appropriate for the bones to be dissected and studied in a manner that would prolong the discomfort,” said Leavitt's press secretary later. Asked if he was aware that this was against the law, she replied, “I don't think he was knowledgeable of all the details.”
Utah Division of History director, Max Evans, got an email from Governor Leavitt and, over the objections of Jones, personally rewrote BYU's state archaeological permit to require immediate reburial of the bones. Jones raised numerous questions over the political power play, including a concern that it was “ethnocentric and racist” to rebury the bones of white emigrants without basic scientific study when similar Native American remains are routinely subjected to such analysis before repatriation.
It was clear that a complete analysis of the bones could not be finished by the September 10 deadline. After a tense meeting with Loving, Jones agreed to a compromise. Long bones and skulls would be examined, but all would be turned over for reburial.
During this time, other relatives of the dead had heard about the find. The factions within the Fancher descendants were mad as hornets, threatening suits, saying the bones should have been tested for DNA and returned to the families of origin, and castigating the LDS Church and Ron Loving for trying to cover up the find.
Resentment over the discovery and of the remains caused a schism in the descendants’ families, with at least one group asking why civil or criminal penalties were not brought against the LDS Church or the MMA for desecrating the grave.
There was confusion over who was in charge of the MMA. Gene Sessions of Weber State University said he'd been elected president of the MMA. He avowed that Loving was voted out of office in November 1999, in the wake of the controversy. Loving said not so fast: “I wasn't voted out of a damn thing. I was moved up. It was my methods and my way of doing business that got that monument done.”
The second installment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre series led the front page of the Tribune the next morning, Monday, March 13, 2000. It was headlined, “Voices of the Dead.”3
Smith wrote, “The Tribune and archeologists believe the full truth has never been told” as new findings came to light.
While the bones were at the University of Utah, forensic anthropologist Shannon Novak's findings were at variance with official church narratives. Written accounts generally claimed that the women and older children were beaten or bludgeoned to death by Native Americans using crude weapons. Novak looked at twenty different skulls of the newly found Mountain Meadows victims and found that at least five adults had gunshot exit wounds in the posterior of the cranium, clearly showing they'd been shot while facing their killers.
The article would go on to report that women were also shot in the head at close range. And at least one youngster, believed to be ten to twelve years old, was killed by a gunshot to the top of the head. There was other forensic evidence that a three-year-old was killed by blunt-force trauma to the head—in contradiction to the church's claims that children under eight were spared.
Smith wrote that bones “began to morph into individuals” as Novak studied the remains. Soon she could identify individuals, including a child's remains with a distinctive reddish tint. They called him “red boy.”
When the Division of History Director, Max Evans, had overruled Jones, Novak had only a few more hours to examine the remains. “We worked through the night to get as much done as we could. This data had to be gathered,” said Novak.
The official church history of the massacre, that John D. Lee and Native Americans killed the Fancher party, no longer held up. Gene Sessions, now claiming to be president of the MMA, said it didn't matter. Dead was dead.
But David Bigler, author of Forgotten Kingdom and a former member of the Utah Board of State History, said, “People want to have the truth, they want it with a capital T and they don't like to have people upset that truth. True believers don't want to think the truth has changed.”
The third installment of the series appeared on Tuesday, March 14, 2000.4
Church president Gordon B. Hinckley delivered the dedicatory address at the new monument on September 11, 1999, adding a legal disclaimer on the advice of attorneys: “That which we have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment of the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of this fateful day.”
The Tribune article asked, if the church held no responsibility, then whom should history hold accountable?
“[L]ocal people,” Hinckley responded. “I've never thought for one minute—and I've read the history of that tragic episode—that Brigham Young had anything to do with it.”
For descendants of John D. Lee, the church's position added to many of their uncertainties from that autumn 150 years before. Now there was an unwanted reminder of the horror. The Tribune reported that those who believed an apology was forthcoming from the church had “come up short.” Scott Fancher of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation in Arkansas, a group of direct descendants of the victims, said that instead of an admission of guilt, they got “an acknowledgement of neglect and of intentional obscuring of the truth.”
Apologies will never be forthcoming, said Gene Sessions, president of the Mountain Meadows Association, “one of which is that as soon as you say you're sorry, here come the wrongful death lawsuits.”
Utah writer Levi Peterson explained another difficulty, especially about Brigham Young's ordering the murders: “If good Mormons committed the massacre, if prayerful leaders ordered it, if apostles and a prophet knew about and later sacrificed John D. Lee, then the sainthood of even the modern church seems tainted. Where is the moral superiority of Mormonism, where is the assurance that God has made Mormons his new chosen people?”
Said Will Bagley, whose Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows was still unpublished at the time the series was written, said the church “was on the horns of a dilemma. It can't acknowledge its historic involvement in a mass murder, and if it can't accept its accountability, it can't repent.”
The Tribune story also brought up blood atonement again and said its shadow still reaches across Utah, the only state today that offers execution by firing squad. Blood atonement, say some historians, is central to understanding why faithful Mormons would conspire to commit mass murder. The article went on to recapitulate some of the reasons that Brigham Young ordered the massacre.
But LDS Church president Hinckley said, “Let the book of the past be closed.”
Dominic Welch, who became publisher of the Tribune at the death of Jerry O'Brien in 1994, was a Korean War veteran and a Catholic from Carbon County, Utah, notable for its mix of non-Mormons, descendants of Europeans who immigrated to Utah to work the coal mines. He also sat on the board of the Newspaper Agency Corporation, the company formed by the joint operating agreement. Dominic was considered a tough negotiator and had consistently turned down the church's request that the JOA pick up the costs of the News publishing mornings. Dominic dug in his heels. The Tribune was not going to pay out of its JOA profits to help the News get new presses required for its morning venture.5
On March 15, 2000, just after Bones of Contention was published, Dominic got a call: LDS Church president Gordon B. Hinckley wanted Dominic in his office. Welch said,
When I arrived there were three men: President Hinckley, James Faust [a lawyer before becoming second counselor to the First Presidency of the church], and Thomas H. Monson [first counselor to the First Presidency and at this writing president of the church].
Tom Monson had been president of the Deseret News Publishing Company and had sat on the Newspaper Agency Corporation board with us for many years. Monson was a fine man and a good partner.
So I go in and Hinckley demands an explanation for the stories on Mountain Meadows.
I said the wrong thing about Mountain Meadows. I told Hinckley, “You should have left the bones with the state instead of giving them to BYU.”6
It made Hinckley angry, Welch said. The president of the church also expressed anger about a 1998 Tribune article on polygamy and a 1991 article on baptizing certain dead people.7
Welch continued: “Jack Gallivan used to be able to go in to the church leaders and apologize. He was the spear catcher, although all he had to do to enrage the church authorities was to mention the Nauvoo Expositor. I should have just gone in and apologized. So maybe I screwed up.”8
He added, “If you meet with the LDS Church leadership, there will always be three of them in the room. Any correspondence will not contain individual names in any narrative, but will say ‘it was related.’”9 Whatever else happened that day in March 2002, it didn't take long for Hinckley's anger to mount.
“This is enough,” Hinckley was later reported to have said in fury after Welch had left.10 There were those who knew exactly what the words meant: the church's desire to see the Tribune expire was amplified by the Mountain Meadows stories, and maneuvering behind the scenes would make sure it happened.
Said Welch, “The church needed to get even. They were entitled.”11
William B. Smart, the Deseret News's editor and general manager from 1975 to 1988, cited the series on the Mountain Meadows Massacre as a “particularly telling example of the Tribune becoming overblown and needlessly abrasive.”12
Fifteen years later, Jay Shelledy mused on the three-part story that set off the firestorm: “Looking back I think we overplayed Bones of Contention. It should have been a single, long piece.”13