Mountain Meadows

Mountain Meadows movie being filmed

Filming is under way in Canada on a Western romance set in the context of the Mountain Meadows Massacre -- one of the darkest and most controversial events in Mormon history.

"September Dawn" is being touted as "a love story set during a tense encounter between a wagon train of settlers that faces off against a renegade Mormon group." Starring Jon Voight and Lolita Davidovich, the project began filming earlier this month in Alberta and is scheduled to shoot through mid-September.

Few additional details about the film are known, including whether [the producer] based his story on historical accounts of the massacre or whether he drew the details from a spate of recent books and films about the event.

Kathleen McInnis, publicity director for "September Dawn," told the Deseret Morning News that Cain and other production people are "so busy with what's going on on the set right now, there's no time at this point" to answer in-depth questions about research for the film's screenplay or what sources were used in writing it. Such queries "may have to wait for a few weeks until we can get towards the end of production."

Long viewed by historians as the darkest chapter in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the massacre of 120 men, women and children by LDS militiamen and Paiute Indians on Sept. 11, 1857, involved Arkansas emigrants following the Old Spanish Trail when they were attacked in Mountain Meadows, north of St. George. Seventeen children survived the attack.

LDSChurch officials, including President Gordon B. Hinckley, have worked with state and local authorities and historians in recent years to assuage lingering animosity and memorialize the victims. The church erected a monument overlooking the site of the massacre in 1999 and held a dedication ceremony to which descendants of those involved were invited. It also reburied bones of 29 victims unearthed during construction of the monument in a separate ceremony.

Three LDSChurch historians have been at work for at least three years on a book they say will access source material previously unavailable to other researchers. Richard Turley, managing director of the Family and Church History department, has teamed with Glen Leonard, director of the Museum of Church History and Art, and Ronald Walker, a professor of history at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for LDS History at BrighamYoungUniversity, to produce "Tragedy at Mountain Meadows." Publication by Oxford University Press is anticipated in 2006, but no firm date has been set.

[Brian Patrick, a professor of film studies at the University of Utah, said] "I've always felt that bringing it out into the open was much better than trying to conceal the event under a carpet. Unless this (new film) is abusive and mean-spirited, but I don't think it will be that. It's a mainstream film, and I don't think they'll attack the LDSChurch. It's already being billed as a group of renegade Mormons who were apart from the church and went against Brigham Young's advice. So, I think they'll try to do their best to not offend people," Patrick said.

"It's just a great human story and a great story of the American West that is as fascinating as they possibly can get. The fact that it's been kind of kept under wraps for so long -- either people didn't know about it or steered away from it -- that's one of the reasons why now there are a lot of people all at once trying to get it out there and possibly exploit it" (Moore, Deseret Morning News, August 26, 2005).

[TBC: It's been kept under wraps because it certainly qualifies as one "of the darkest" incidents in Mormon history. The Mormon Church has a long history of denial and this film promises to do little to expose this horrendous event to the light of day. It is, however, interesting that what they for so many years tried to deny is still subject to "spin.” John D. Lee, the only Mormon ever convicted and executed for the crime, protested to the end of his days that the massacre was conducted with the full knowledge and assent of Brigham Young. "I studied to make this man’s will my pleasure for thirty years. See, now, what I have come to this day! I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner" (Bagley, "Blood of the Prophets," p. 316).]