Mac, the Fancher party was one of thousands and thousands of wagon-train parties and individuals traveling through Mormon territories pre-Civil War, when SLC was a pretty welcome rest stop and resupply point. By all accounts, once out in the wilderness pretty nearly everyone managed to mind their Ps and Qs, no matter what their feelings about Mormons, Indians or anyone else.
Emigrants with their families and everything they owned in a wagon weren’t generally too keen on provoking anything that put all of that at a risk.

Which was one of my points – the Fancher party appears to have not done or said anything out of line to any of the Mormon citizens they encountered while transisting Utah territory. No poisoning of food, no molesting of women, or being generally abusive, although at one point Captain Fancher did chide one of the other men for rudeness. They’d nothing to do with any murders back in Arkansas, had left there before anything had blown up politically and wanted to be in California as fast as possible. Out of the party about 70 were children, and thirty were women, and I doubt that any of the men were stupid enough to provoked a fight when they would have been that badly outnumbered. Emigrants may have hated and feared Indians, for example – but no one deliberatly picked a fight with the Sioux, and I suspect the same applied to Mormons.

The Fanchers weren’t stupid… just fantastically unlucky to be in the wrong place at a bad time. The Parowan and Cedar City militias had their mad minute, their opportunity to strike back for every injustice ever done to Mormons… but in the long run I suspect they regretted having done so almost at once.

Their first Prophet, Joseph Smith, was shot down by a mob while under the sworn protection of the Governor of Illinois, Dan Ford; they had been driven out of Missouri with fire and sword, said actions legitimized by the “exterminating order” issued by Governor Lilburn Boggs. They had a LOT of reasons to have tremendous antipathy toward America and Americans already; Buchanan’s dispatch of the U.S. Army to “subdue” them on nothing more than the outright lies of a corrupt, womanizing spoils appointee certainly didn’t help matters.

With the U.S. Army on its way bringing the scum of the earth to, as their own soldiers openly admitted, rape and pillage the “upstart” Mormons, I see no reason whatsoever to be surprised that the Mormons did what they did at Mountain Meadows. Americans brutalized those people because of their religion and completely denied them the protection of the state and national laws they were entitled to as citizens. You think they wouldn’t have resented Americans because of it?

Mormons didn’t have to wonder what American citizens would do to them if they got the upper hand; they already knew from bitter experience. Brigham Young was ready to move every Mormon in Utah south to Mexico rather than again suffer the depredations they had endured back east.

When the U.S. Army finally was allowed to march through Salt Lake City to their agreed-on camp 40 miles west at Camp Floyd, they marched through a deserted city populated only by men at the corners of each block carrying lighted torches. Those men had orders from Brigham Young to burn the mostly wooden city to the ground rather than let the “mobbers” steal the fruits of Mormon enterprise again, as they had previously done in Missouri and Illinois. The rest of SLC’s Mormon populace was in Provo ready and waiting for the word from Brigham to go south. Mormons neither liked nor trusted most Americans and, as far as I can see, had extremely good and logical reasons for having such an attitude.

The Fancher party was a group of American Southerners stupid enough to be in the midst of a lot of people who had very good reason to hate them. If they made any of the comments and threats that have been attributed to them, they were playing with matches on top of a pile of dynamite soaked with gasoline. I suspect they did make those comments and threats because they had been raised and socialized to hold Mormons in contempt. They may not have placed the explosives themselves, but their actions set the explosion off. It wouldn’t have taken much.

The LDS Church is apologizing for the Mountain Meadows Massacre now, but I see no reason for them to do so. If the people back east had treated Mormons only half as well as they were legally entitled to be, the vast amount of rage, anger and bitterness that fueled Mountain Meadows would never have accumulated.

If there is a multiple American Beslan in the not too distant future, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to figure that anyone Muslim will be taking a tremendous chance by continuing to live in an American society so justifiably angry about the actions of other Muslims. Should such a horrific action occur, a massacre of American Muslims on a Mountain Meadows (or greater) scale wouldn’t surprise me in the least.