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“The Bloodiest Drama Ever Perpetrated on American Soil”: Staging the Mountain Meadows Massacre for Entertainment
“The Bloodiest Drama Ever Perpetrated on American Soil”: Staging the Mountain Meadows Massacre for Entertainment
By MELVIN L. BASHORE
In 2002, the oldest extant billboard in the country was discovered behind a brick façade of a downtown building in Jamestown, New York. The five-panel billboard advertised a March 14, 1878, performance of Buffalo Bill Cody’s frontier melodrama, May Cody, or Lost and Won . Early research revealed that not only was this an important artifact from Cody’s early theatrical career, it was an important artifact in the history of American theater and outdoor advertising. Five years after its discovery, the restored billboard was placed on permanent display in what had been Jamestown’s Allen Opera House now its civic center.1 The historical event which forms the basis of and main feature in this drama is the Mountain Meadows Massacre. On September 11, 1857,
A poster for the Wild West and Great Forepaugh Shows announcing the performance of “The Atrocious Mountain Meadow Massacre.”
Princeton University Library
Mormons with the aid of Paiute Indians slaughtered over 120 men, women, and children in a California-bound wagon train in an isolated part of southern Utah Territory. Mormons tried to deflect attention from their involvement in this horrible atrocity by blaming the Indians. Complex factors postponed investigation into the matter for years until several participants were arrested. Although the public suspected Mormon complicity in the horrific crime, certain proof did not surface for almost twenty years. Only after John D. Lee was brought to trial in the mid-1870s did the public learn how the Mormons used a false promise of safety to lure the emigrants from their fortified encampment and kill all but seventeen young children. Lee’s trial and subsequent execution focused much attention in the press on the massacre and Mormonism.
Plays about frontier history were already very popular in America in the 1870s. Bill Cody was quick to capitalize on the public’s interest in Mormonism and the tragic massacre. The Mormon element in the drama was emphasized in all its newspaper advertisements. Standard advertisements which appeared in many newspapers whereever the melodrama was performed prominently noted the massacre and mentioned Mormon church president Brigham Young and Danites.2
The general public’s interest in all things Mormon was sparked in the mid-1870s by the trials and execution of John D. Lee. The publicity generated by Lee’s trials brought audiences to view a production of the massacre performed by the Foresters dramatic troupe in Denver and other Colorado towns in 1876. The Golden Weekly Globe reported its troupe of actors were “first class in every particular.”3 But it was Lee’s execution on March 23, 1877, that excited the public the most as newspapers throughout America reported the event, printed his confessions, and revisited the story of the massacre in lurid detail.4 While the publicity about the execution revitalized interest in Bill Cody’s theater shows, it had an entirely opposite effect on Mormon proselytizing work.
Interestingly, the details about the massacre that were splashed across the nation’s newspapers so inflamed the public that missionary work was severely undermined in many parts of the nation.5 Brigham Young wrote to Joseph F. Smith that the public “turned a deaf ear” to Mormon missionaries throughout the country.6 Many were released to return home when every avenue for preaching was denied them. Missionary Philip Hurst felt the effects of the adverse newspaper publicity following Lee’s execution while proselyting in Pike County, Illinois, “The whole country is full of the most sensational stories in regard to Lee’s Confession, and no matter how improbable the story, it is greedily swallowed.”7 With no investigators to teach or listen to his message, he returned to Utah. Orson Hyde Eggleston, on a mission in Michigan, also found doors being closed to his message. “I continued my labors alone holding meetings every opportunity,” he wrote in early May 1877, “till all the school houses were closed against me and I had to preach in private houses and every avenue seemed to close up.”8 On May 29, 1877, he received “a letter from President Young’s office that the elders in Michigan were at liberty to return home whenever they wished to do so.”9 The impact of this public uproar about the Mormons and the Mountain Meadows Massacre on missionary work was wide-ranging and long-lasting in 1877. “In the States, at present,” wrote Brigham Young in early August 1877, “there are but few Elders left. . . . The furor created throughout this country, soon after the execution of Jno. D. Lee, was so great that most of the brethern returned home, feeling satisfied that until that feeling should wear itself out, their labors would be measureably without profit.”10
While publicity about the massacre caused the Mormon church’s stock in the public eye to decline at this time, Bill Cody’s popularity ascended with the May Cody melodrama. It came at a most opportune time for him as interest in his theater shows had been on an ever-spiraling decline. He had even given thought to giving up his career in show business unless business at the box-office picked up.
Cody began the entertainment career that took him to international reknown in 1872. In that year, he gathered a group of traveling actors who he led from city to city and town to town, performing one to two plays, before moving to the next town. Before 1870, theaters supported resident companies, but it became more profitable and affordable to schedule traveling companies that brought variety to the entertainment scene. These traveling companies were popularly called “combinations,” because they performed a combination of one to two plays in their repertoire, thus extending their ability to multiply their income in each locale.
William “Buffalo Bill” Cody.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In summer 1877, Cody saw the potential for box-office profit in producing a border drama that focused on Mormons, John D. Lee, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre. He hired Andrew Sheridan Burt, a decorated major in the U.S. Infantry, to write a block-buster drama. In the drama, Burt mingled truth and fiction so artfully that audiences couldn’t tell “that his stories were less obviously fictional.” 11 As in all popular melodramas, the plot revolves around a heroine (Buffalo Bill’s real-life sister, May Cody), who eventually is liberated from “savage captivity.”12 May Cody, a private secretary to a well-to-do New York socialite, joins the fated wagon train en route to the West. A reenactment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre occurs in the second act. John D. Lee and his band of nefarious Mormons, disguised as Indians, attack the wagon train. Lee abducts May Cody. The massacre takes place in Echo Canyon, thirty miles east of Salt Lake City, rather than the actual locale which was hundreds of miles away in distant southern Utah. This geographic inaccuracy is necessary to bring Buffalo Bill into the story as May’s rescuer. He providentially enters the scene because he was out west with Johnston’s Army, sequestered for the winter near Echo Canyon—a false fact which he later incorporated into his life history, despite the fact that he was in school in Missouri during the Utah War. When Buffalo Bill enters the drama, his sister has been taken to Salt Lake City where she is in the clutches of Brigham Young, on the brink of being forced to become one of his plural wives. Bill, disguised as the Indian White Wolf, comes to her rescue. In the final act, Bill is captured by the soldiers at Fort Bridger, charged with being a spy, and condemned to death. Happily, he proves his innocence and all ends well.13 Some of the recognizable historical figures in the drama include General William S. Harney (not because he was associated with the Utah War, but probably because he was well-known), and two of Brigham Young’s plural wives, Ann Eliza Young and Amelia Folsom Young.
The play opened in New York City in the first week of September 1877 and stayed for a two-week run. Cody took his production on the road for the next twenty-nine months, criss-crossing the country, playing opera houses and theaters in thirty-three states and the District of Columbia. May Cody was staged in seven Illinois cities during January and February 1878. Springfield got to see Buffalo Bill rescue his “sister” from the rascal Mormons in its opera house on January 31, 1878. The Springfield newspaper characterized May Cody as a “refined sensational drama.” 14 To attract a crowd, they quoted a commendatory review from the Keokuk Constitution: “There was red and green fire, slow curtain, oodles of gunpowder, heaps of heavy villains and Indians . . . . Virtue suffered, was scalped, and resurrected, and triumphed in the end, amid the wildest enthusiasm among the boys. Bill did some magnificent shooting—snuffing the light out of a candle held in a man’s hand, put out a cigar he was smoking, shot a potato off his head.”15 Cody’s show packed the theaters with uncritical reviews, positive testimonials, and advertising.
As an actor, Cody had little going for him other than charisma. During his May Cody years, his acting ability was uniformly derided as dreadful. A Chicago reviewer called Cody “the poorest of all poor actors” in shows at Haverly’s Theater in December 1878. He contended that “the only actor of any merit in the whole combination is a trained donkey.”16 With these critical acting reviews, it was wise that Cody gave prominent billing in newspaper ads to the trained donkey, named “Jack Cass.” According to one review, the donkey “performed as if it had been educated for the stage. It knew when and where to make its entrance and exits” without prompting. The talented donkey “had all the bad habits of a man. It smoked, chewed, drank whisky, and would have lied, if it could talk. It went in on its merits and came out with honor, a star performer.”17 A New York reviewer thought Buffalo Bill’s debut there was a “failure.” “He moved about the stage like a bull in a china shop,” wrote the reviewer.18
Some reviewers expressed a desire for more shooting in Cody’s performances. At one May Cody performance in Baltimore in September 1878, Cody’s shooting had dire consequences. He fired his gun at his Indian pursuers while charging up an imitation mountain on his pony. By mistake, one barrel of his pistol “happened to be loaded with a ball” which hit a boy sitting in the upper gallery in the chest.19 Fortunately the accident was not fatal and Cody was solicitous in paying all the boy’s medical bills and inviting him out to his North Platte ranch when he recovered.20
In spring 1879, Bill took his troupe across the country to California. He grossed more than nine thousand dollars the first week at the California Theatre in San Francisco. Some reviewers were thrilled by the performance while others, like the Daily Alta reviewer, knew enough about Mormonism to be critical of script technicalities. “For John D. Lee to address Brigham Young as ‘Holy Father,’ is simply ridiculous. The scene in the Endowment House has not the least semblance to the truth,” he wrote. “But to go into any real criticism on May Cody is like breaking a butterfly on the wheel, and we desist.”21
An ad announcing the reenactment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of emigrants by Indians appearing in the July 9, 1903 edition of The [Earlington, Kentucky] Bee.
Library of Congress, Chornicaling America: Historic American Newspapers
After a successful twoweek run in San Francisco, Cody headed back east, stopping to perform in Sacramento, Carson City, Virginia City, and a two-day stop in Salt Lake City in early May 1879. In the very center of the Mormon kingdom, Cody decided that it might not be wise to perform May Cody. In both performances he opted to play the other melodrama in his repertoire, Knight of the Plains, which had no Mormon content. Had he performed May Cody, his play would have been ridiculed for its inaccuraciesand caused consternation for its sensational portrayal of the Mormon faith and its leaders. Attendance at three shows in two days steadily declined and the Salt Lake Herald ripped the performance, “To say it was poor hardly expresses it.”22
One attempt to perform a massacre themed play in Salt Lake City in mid-July 1880 met with a chilly reception. Journalist and humorist William L. Visscher brought California through Death Valley , an anti-Mormon play about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, to the Liberal Institute. First performed in 1878, the play had been received well in towns throughout California. Later known as Fonda , the play was first performed under the title of On the Trail, then later as The Plains, or the Trials in Death Valley. The authors were Sam Smith, an erstwhile poet and playwright from San Francisco, and John Wallace Crawford, an Irish-born poet and frontier scout known widely as Captain Jack Crawford. When Mormons and Gentiles who were dependent on Mormon business both boycotted the play, Visscher’s acting troupe was stranded in Salt Lake City for ten days. Not until newly-appointed territorial governor Eli H. Murray and other sympathizers sponsored a benefit performance, did the troupe amass enough funds to leave town.23
Andrew S. Burt.
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY
After their poor reception in Salt Lake City, Buffalo Bill’s troupe moved on to Denver where they could safely perform the more popular May Cody without being subject to the critical and more knowledgeable Mormons. After seeing the first of four May Cody shows, the Rocky Mountain News remarked, “This is one of the usual border dramas that can never fail to draw the masses.” It noted that Buffalo Bill “was not much of an actor, but the fact that he has ‘been there,’ and in worse places, lends a sort of charm to the play.” 24 “The spectacle of Buffalo Bill Cody playing himself,” Cody biographer Louis Warren noted, “attracted audiences.” 25 The fictional autobiographical legend and false claims invented by Cody helped promote his shows and fill theaters.
In June 1880, an article in a Georgetown, Colorado, newspaper reprinted an article from the Omaha Herald about a play performed on a Denver stage. It purported to be “one of Buffalo Bill’s” plays, in other words, May Cody 26
During this Denver performance, the Mountain Meadows Massacre scene was presented as a tableaux “illuminated and intensified,” as the report described, “by all the glory and glare of blue and red fire.” But this special performance became more lively than usual as the newspaper reported:
Cody continued to perform May Cody in the Midwest, East, and throughout the South and Southwest through February 1880. He didn’t begin his Wild West shows until 1883, but even then, he continued performing frontier melodramas in theaters until 1886. During the melodrama’s two and a half year run, it grossed well over one hundred thousand dollars.
In 1881, there were 138 traveling combinations in the United States and by 1886 that number had grown to almost three hundred.28 Cody’s success with the Mountain Meadows Massacre-themed drama did not go unnoticed by other acting troupes. The Comique Company gave a benefit performance of a Mountain Meadows drama at the Kansas City Opera House in 1878. Proceeds from the drama were donated to those in Richmond, Missouri, who were left homeless by a cyclone. The Kansas City Journal reported that the drama “was rendered as it has never been rendered in this city before.”29 Miss Agnes Cody (no relation to Buffalo Bill), who newspapers billed as “America’s most talented and versatile young actress,” toured the east and midwest with her company in the late 1880s.30 Among the plays she had in her repertoire was Joaquin Murietta’s The Danites, which was based on “facts connected with the ‘Mountain Meadow’ massacre.”31 One Pennsylvania reviewer commended her for showing “a great deal of uncommon force and deftness” in playing the role of Billy Piper.32 But her Danite-themed drama was not popular with audiences and lasted little more than a few months in 1889 and 1890. Buffalo Bill had many imitators, but none ever reached his level of popularity or financial success.
The next form of popular entertainment to use the Mountain Meadows Massacre was the Wild West shows. Adam Forepaugh was the first Wild West showman to incorporate the massacre into his performance. Forepaugh rose from poor beginnings in Philadelphia, becoming wealthy selling horses to the government during the Civil War. He got into the circus business in 1864. With his hard-nosed business acumen, Forepaugh became a rival of P. T. Barnum, the two having the largest circuses in the nation. He was the first to incorporate a Wild West show into his circus. The Mountain Meadows Massacre was a popular part of Forepaugh’s Wild West show from 1888 until the showman’s death in 1890. Newspaper advertisements referred to the company’s portrayal of the “atrocious” Mountain Meadows Massacre as a “most instructive Historical Object Lesson” showing the “Dangers of Early Emigration Across the Plains.”33 The cast included “200 Mounted Combatants, Genuine Savages, Scouts and Soldiers.”34 Although Custer’s Last Stand in 1876 at the Little Bighorn was also re-enacted in Forepaugh’s show, the Mountain Meadows Massacre portrayal received top billing in advertisements. After seeing the show, a reporter for the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel wrote that the scene of the massacre “stirred the pulses” of the audience, as it was portrayed “with a realism that no one could witness unmoved.” 35 After Forepaugh’s death, James E. Cooper, an old-time circus partner of Barnum and Bailey, purchased and managed the combined circus and Wild West show with James A. Bailey as his silent partner.36 The massacre scene continued to be part of the performance until Cooper’s demise in January 1892.37 Gordon W. Lillie, who was popularly known as Pawnee Bill, was the next to use the massacre in his Wild West show. He started a Wild West show with his trick-shooting/horseback-riding wife, Mae Lillie, in 1888, calling it “Pawnee Bill’s Historic Wild West.” When he began portraying the massacre, as early as 1891, his show went by the ponderous title “Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Indian Museum and Mexican Hippodrome.”38 Traveling throughout the United States and Canada, the massacre was a part of his show through at least 1906. 39 In 1897, his show had a six-week run at a commercial exposition in Pittsburgh. During twice daily performances, the portrayal of the Mountain Meadows Massacre included the unlikely killing of Kit Carson, who lived over ten years after the massacre. 40 Articles placed in 33 newspapers by publicity advancement often quoted a complimentary article about the show from the Rochester Herald . The Mountain Meadows scene was mentioned with a few acts in the show as being “well worth double the price of admission.”41 The mail coach which was used in the massacre scene had a colorful history of its own. It had been built in the 1840s and used on mail runs in Kansas and the Indian Territory. Newspapers reported that “no less than nine persons have met their death” while riding in it as passengers. 42 Pawnee Bill was able to compete (or not compete) with Buffalo Bill by touring in Europe when Cody was performing in the states.43 In 1909, Lillie and Cody merged their two Wild West shows with great financial success, but the massacre was not a part of their combined program.44
This ad from the Daily Kennebec Journal, November. 14, 1877, gives billing to performances about the Danites, Brigham Young, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE.COM
Kennedy Brothers Wild West show incorporated the massacre into their program from about 1903 through 1908. Favoring long titles, it was called “Kennedy’s Wild West Show, Indian Congress and Roman Hippodrome.” The massacre was the third act in a nine-part show. This differed from other entertainment portrayals of the massacre in that there was no mention of Mormon involvement. While other massacre-themed entertainments sensationalized Mormon participation, Kennedy’s show portrayed it solely as an Indian attack. In Kennedy’s show, Indians attack a wagon outfit bound for the California gold fields. A pitched battle ensues. Believing most of the emigrants have been killed, two Indians “return to scalp the supposed dead.” But some of the emigrants are still alive and shoot at the advancing Indians. The newspaper advertisement adds that “this act is very amusing as well as exciting.”45 Later Kennedy decided to open the show with the massacre scene and headlined it as the first act.46
The massacre was the grand finale of the Oklahoma Ranch Wild West Show performed in San Francisco in 1913. Like the Kennedy show, there was no hint of Mormon participation. It was strictly an Indian massacre from which no one survived. The San Francisco Call reported that “Indian bareback riders swooped down on a party of emigrants camped beside their prairie schooner. Firing with deadly effect from behind the shelter of their horses, the Indians slaughtered the entire party and rode off victorious,with the audience almost believing that it was a real occurrence they beheld.”47 In both the Kennedy and the Oklahoma Ranch shows, the role of the Mormons in the massacre had been completely erased. Although popular Wild West shows had retained the fact of Mormon participation for more than thirty years, their part in the story was eventually expunged. It was sacrificed to satisfy the public’s delight in sensational entertainment. In the end, truth didn’t matter and the Indians received all the blame.
With the massacre and John D. Lee’s execution in the distant past, the public mind could easily accept an all-Indian massacre. The stereotype of bloodthirsty Indians—that they were “incurably savage” and could not be civilized—was firmly rooted in the public mind. 48 The crass, one-sided portrayal of Indians in Wild West shows must shoulder much of the blame for framing the public’s misperception. Those who attended these early twentieth-century portrayals of the massacre did not even question the absence of the Mormons in the story.
Interest in Wild West shows declined with the advent of motion pictures. Even so, the Mountain Meadows Massacre endured as a popular part of these shows at least as late as 1914. In that year, Wyoming Bill’s Wild West Show included a “true to life representation of the famous Mountain Meadow Massacre.”49 This Wild West show, which was only in business from 1913 to 1914, was billed as being “strictly refined in every particular” and “highly constructive.”50 Wyoming Bill wanted his Wild West show to stand out from all others in terms of authenticity and instructive qualities.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre even proved to be a popular event for re-enactment in non-commercial community entertainments. In two western communities in the 1890s, the re-enactment of the massacre seems to have been done purely for the sake of entertainment. The town of Marysville, California, re-enacted the massacre scene as a part of their 1891 celebration of California’s admission as a state.51 Marysville’s admission day celebration also featured an 1849 pack-train scene which linked the gold rush to California’s history, but that state’s link to the massacre is thin, unless it was as the eventual place of destination for the Arkansas emigrant train. In 1893, Butte, Montana, held a three-day Independence Day celebration. They killed fifty beeves to feed twelve hundred Indians who were “engaged to give a representation of the Mountain Meadow massacre.”52 As in the later wild west shows, the massacre portrayal was an all-Indian affair, strictly for the entertainment of the Montana cowboys.
For several years after about 1903, the massacre was a featured topic in the illustrated lectures of Professor B. F. Beardsley of Hartford, Connecticut. He displayed sixteen cycloramic scenes to help illustrate his lecture. A 1904 Ohio newspaper remarked that the pictures were “realistic” and helped in “vividly portraying this historical event.”53 He would sometimes combine his lecture on the massacre with a “fascinating” illustrated lecture on the human ear, filled with “fun and facts” and considered to be his “best illustrated lecture.” 54 Others who gave illustrated lectures in which the massacre received notice included Mrs. Clarence R. Gale, a woman who had taught school in Salt Lake City for three years under the sponsorship of the New West Education Commission.55
Motion picture film makers early grasped the inherent drama in the massacre and, most importantly, its drawing power at the box-office. In 1911, the Pathé Frères film company produced a motion picture about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Incensed at what they viewed as a misrepresentation of fact and a “libel on Utah,” the Salt Lake Commercial Club and Utah Development League demanded the immediate withdrawal of the film. They threatened the company that if they didn’t suppress the film, they would register a complaint with the national film censorship bureau. Those who had viewed the film in Southern California thought the portrayal of the massacre was “grossly exaggerated and an insult to Utah.”56 The Nevada National Feature Film Company was purposely formed in 1913 because they were convinced that the movie public was growing tired of concocted plots. They thought there was “more drawing power in fact than in fiction.” To that end they proposed making some historical feature films on such topics relating to Nevada history as the Pony Express, Donner Party disaster, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.57
The massacre continued to be featured in various forms of popular media well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It appeared in newspaper cartoons, radio dramas, and film. J. Carroll Mansfield depicted it in a comic strip called “High Lights of History” in 1927. It was printed in Sunday morning funny papers along with such other comic strips as “Cicero Sap” and “Little Mary Mixup.” 58 Ten years later, newspapers carried syndicated cartoonist Robert Wathen’s serialized comic strip entitled “The Tragic Case of the Mountain Meadows Massacre!” 59 It appeared in six installments in newspapers throughout the country. The attack on the Arkansas wagon train was depicted as strictly an atrocity performed by a “bad looking lot” of white men—not Mormons and not Indians. When smoke signals appeared on the horizon, the rough-looking bunch of cowboys proposed that they join forces to fight what looked like an impending Indian attack. The attack never materialized and the cowboys set up their camp next to the wagon corral. As night fell, the ever-cautious captain of the wagon train shared his suspicions that they may have been duped by these strangers. He was especially wary about their leader, Sam Wilkes (John D. Lee), “I don’t like him. . . . He looks fishy.” During the night the emigrants were slaughtered inside the corral.60 The final episode featured the trial with the defense attorney claiming there “was not one scintilla of evidence” upon which to convict “the only one ever tried for the crime.”61
Pawnee Bill, William Lillie.
OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
On March 10, 1944, the massacre was the focus of episode number 1,738 of the Lone Ranger radio show featuring the masked Texas Ranger, his loyal Indian friend Tonto, and the magnificent white stallion Silver. In 1995, local Mormon audiences objected to a massacre scene that appeared in a historical musical drama extravaganza at the Tuacahn outdoor theater in St. George.62
In 2007, a Canadian film entitled September Dawn directed by Christopher Cain featured a fictional love story woven into a controversial portrayal of the massacre. The film received mostly negative reviews and only remained in American theaters for two weeks. Popular movie critic Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “What a strange, confused, unpleasant movie this is.”63 It was a box-office failure and lost almost ten million dollars.
The portrayal of the Mountain Meadows Massacre proved to be an enduring entertainment attraction for audiences for more than half a century. A correspondent of the San Francisco Bulletin , writing from Callville, Arizona, in June 1866, unknowingly recognized the dramatic potential inherent in this awful event. He deemed the Mountain Meadows Massacre “the bloodiest drama ever perpetrated on American soil.”64 He had spoken with Indians in the vicinity who admitted their participation in the massacre. They also told him that Mormons were the “instigators and chief actors in the tragedy.”65 Although suspected, the truth of this accusation would not be proven in court until the trial of John D. Lee eleven years later. His trial and execution incited a firestorm of negative press against the Mormons. Buffalo Bill utilized this negative publicity to attract audiences to see May Cody , the show that really launched his show business career. For decades afterwards, the Mountain Meadows Massacre was served up to audiences hungry for this singular event of Mormon violence. It became standard fodder for melodramas, plays, illustrated lectures, dramatic tableau performances, community celebrations, Wild West shows, and later was featured in motion pictures and radio dramas.
Since the days of the early republic, the representation of violence has maintained an enduring and ever-increasing foothold in the world of drama and entertainment. Since those early times, artistic manifestations have mirrored the fabric of American society. American history is rife with moments when violence changed the course of history. This was no more evident than on the American frontier, whose boundaries were pushed further and further west, displacing the American Indians by right of might. Violence was commonplace in the West. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, although horrific in the extreme, was not peculiar to its time or place. Recent studies of American drama history contend that while violence began first as a mere prop, it has increasingly escalated to become the main focus in modern dramatic entertainment.66 The portrayal of the massacre and its enduring attraction for audiences has certainly not been unusual.
No one has conclusively found the person who can be credited with first saying “never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”67 The phrase has been traced to at least 1940, but it is evident that the idea was operational in almost all of these massacre entertainments dating back to its first successful portrayal in a Buffalo Bill melodrama in the late 1870s. The genesis of the phrase predated Hollywood. Tragedy generally makes for good drama, but the quality of these massacre-themed productions was invariably poor.
NOTES
Melvin L. Bashore is a curator in the Historic Sites Division of the Church History Library, Salt Lake City.
1 Tom Buckham, “Out of the Dust, the Wild West,” Buffalo (NY) News, February 11, 2006; and Jana Bommersbach, “Buffalo Bill’s Billboard,” True West 55(May 2008): 18-19.
2 Anti-Mormon books and newspaper articles attributed every isolated instance of purported Mormon violence to Danites or Destroying Angels. Lynn M. Hilton and Hope A. Hilton, “Danites,” in Utah History Encyclopedia, Allan Kent Powell, ed. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 126; and Alexander L. Baugh, “Danites,” in Arnold K. Garr, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard O. Cowan, eds., Encyclopedia of Latterday Saint History (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000), 275.
3 Golden (CO) Weekly Globe, December 9, 1876.
4 The Deseret News reported this new crusade in the nation’s newspapers in several articles. See “Going Crazy Concerning Mormonism,” Deseret News, April 4, 1877; and “All Are Talking of Utah,” Deseret News, April 11, 1877.
5 Brian Reeves examined the impact of adverse publicity about the massacre following Lee’s execution in “John D. Lee’s Execution and the Near Death of Missionary Work,” at the Mormon History Association Conference, St. George, Utah, May 26, 2011.
6 Brigham Young to Joseph F. Smith, July 27, 1877, Salt Lake City, in “Foreign Correspondence,” Latterday Saints’ Millennial Star 39(September 3, 1877):570.
7 Philip Hurst, Diary, vol. 1, undated/unpaginated, Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, hereafter cited as LDS Church History Library.
8 Orson Hyde Eggleston, Reminiscences and diary, May 9, 1877, LDS Church History Library.
9 Ibid., May 29, 1877.
10 Brigham Young to W. E. Pack, August 6, 1877, letterbooks, Brigham Young, Office files, LDS Church History Library.
11 Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 144.
12 Ibid., 157.
13 A description of the plot is found in Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 103. An 1879 performance in Texas positioned the Mountain Meadows Massacre scene happening later in the play than the second act. “Tremont Opera-House,” Galveston (TX) Daily News, December 20, 1879.
14 “Buffalo Bill,” (Springfield) Daily Illinois State Register, January 29, 1878.
15 Ibid., January 31, 1878. Cody entertained audiences with his shooting talents, but stopped doing that by January 1879. Sandra K. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2008), 120.
16 “Haverly’s,” Chicago Inter Ocean, December 18, 1878.
17 Quoted from the Keokuk Constitution in “Buffalo Bill,” (Springfield) Daily Illinois State Register, January 31, 1878.
18 “Dramatic and Musical,” Brooklyn (NY) Eagle, April 16, 1878.
19 “Buffalo Bill Makes a Bad Shot,” Galveston (TX) Daily News, September 11, 1878.
20 Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage, 115.
21 Ibid., 124.
22 “The Theatre,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, May 4, 1879.
23 This incident is recounted fully in Lewis O. Saum, “’Astonishing the Natives’: Bringing the Wild West to Los Angeles,” Montana:The Magazine of Western History 38 (Summer 1988): 2-13.
24 “The Border Drama,” Denver Rocky Mountain News, July 23, 1879.
25 Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 155.
26 “Not in the Bills,” Georgetown (CO) Courier, June 3, 1880. It should be noted that there is a puzzling gap of eleven months between the publication of this reprinted article in June 1880, and the performance of Buffalo Bill’s May Cody melodrama in Denver in July 1879. The original article must have been printed not long after the performance as it mentioned it was staged “not a great while ago.” Although Cody had the only performing troupe known to this author that was dramatizing the Mountain Meadows Massacre at that time, it is possible that another lesser-known troupe might have performed this hilarious massacre scene.
27 “Not in the Bills,” Georgetown (CO) Courier, June 3, 1880.
28 Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage, 10, 157.
29 “The Richmond Sufferers,” Kansas City Journal, June 9, 1878.
30 “Opening of Library Hall,” Indiana (PA) Progress, September 25, 1889.
31 “Miss Agnes Cody,” Indiana (PA) Democrat, May 16, 1889.
32 Pittsburg (PA) Dispatch, March 10, 1889.
33 “4-Paw and the Wild West (advertisement),” Potsdam (NY) Courier Freeman, August 15, 1888.
34 Ibid.
35 “Forepaugh Arrives in Town,” Fitchburg (MA) Daily Sentinel, July 26, 1890.
36 “The Programme,” Pittsburg (PA) Dispatch, April 27, 1890.
37 Ibid., May 18, 1890, “Cooper’s Jubilee Year,” Stanford (KY) Semi-Weekly Interior, September 30, 1890, and “Obituary,” New York Sun, January 2, 1892.
38 “Pawnee Bill,” Richmond (VA) Times, July 12, 1891 and “Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show,” Statesville (NC) Landmark, October 5, 1893.
39 “Season’s Attractions at Coney Island,” Salt Lake Herald, June 24, 1906; and “Pawnee Bill’s Circus Delights Large Crowds,” Washington, (D.C.) Times, August 26, 1906.
40 “The Big Exposition,” Cumberland (MD) Evening Times, September 15, 1897.
41 “The Pawnee Bill Show,” Richmond (VA) Dispatch, May 10, 1902.
42 “Pawnee Bill’s Wild West,” Fitchburg (MA) Daily Sentinel, June 14, 1892.
43 Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 151.
44 “Buffalo Bill’s Show,” New York Tribune, April 25, 1909; and “Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill Form a Strong Combination,” Washington, (D.C.) Herald, May 23, 1909.
45 “List of Features of Kennedy’s Wild West Show, Indian Congress and Roman Hippodrome!” Earlington (KY) Bee, July 9, 1903.
46 “Kennedy’s Wild West Show,” Hartford (KY) Republican, September 4, 1908.
47 “Large Crowd Applauds Massacre by Indians,” San Francisco Call, August 24, 1913.
48 Alden T. Vaughan, “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” American Historical Review 87(October 1982): 953.
49 “Wild West Show Coming,” Bedford (PA) Gazette, May 15, 1914.
50 “Wild West Show Coming,” Northfield (MN)News, August 21, 1914.
51 “Pacific Coast Items,” San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, August 17, 1891.
52 “Nebraska and Nebraskans,” Omaha (NE) Daily Bee, June 15, 1893.
53 “Mormon Massacre,” Sandusky (OH) Evening Star, March 10, 1904.
54 “Beardsley Tonight (advertisement),” Coshocton (OH) Daily Age, March 14, 1907.
55 “The C. C. Course,” Fitchburg (MA) Sentinel, December 6, 1890.
56 “Business Men See Libel on Utah,” Ogden Evening Standard, January 11, 1912.
57 “Nevada Motion Picture Plans,” (Reno) Nevada State Journal, July 20, 1913.
58 Davenport (IA) Democrat and Leader, September 18, 1927.
59 Kokomo (IN) Tribune, June 7-12, 1937.
60 “The Tragic Case of the Mountain Meadows Massacre! In 6 Episodes, No. 4,” Kokomo (IN) Tribune, June 10, 1937.
61 Kokomo (IN) Tribune, June 12, 1937.
62 David Pace, “Tuacahn’s Tale,” Salt Lake City 6 (September-October 1995): 30.
63 Roger Ebert, “September Dawn,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 24, 2007.
64 “Mountain Meadow Massacre,” Daily Union Vedette, July 27, 1866.
65 Ibid.
66 See Alfonso Ceballos Muñoz, Ramón Espejo Romero, and Bernardo Muñoz Martinez, eds., Violence in American Drama: Essays on Its Stagings, Meanings and Effects (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2011).
67 The history of the saying is traced and discussed on “The Big Apple” website. Source: http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/never_let_the_facts_get_in_the_way_of_a_good_story/, (accessed November 17, 2011).
