The 1857 massacre of some 120 men, women and children by Mormon settlers and Paiute Indians in southern Utah remains a mystery to film producer Steve Talley.
After two months of research and interviewing experts on the topic, he still has questions about who was behind the Mountain Meadows Massacre, their motives and whether the real culprits were ever brought to justice.But his documentary, "The Mormon Rebellion," was not intended to uncover any secrets about the worst killing of American citizens by other citizens until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Instead, Talley hopes the film explains why such a tragedy could occur and illustrates how Americans struggle to live up to the ideals and freedoms they espouse.
"In the tease at the beginning, we call the Mormon rebellion `America's fiercest confrontation between church and state,' " Talley said from Los Angeles. "It really goes right to the heart of our most cherished notions of what this country is supposed to be."
The documentary, scheduled to air Dec. 18 on cable television's History Channel, closes a year of extraordinary coverage of Mormon history as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Mormon migration to the West.
FilmRoos Inc., the Los Angeles-based company that produced the film for the History Channel's "In Search of History" series, calls the timing of the program serendipitous.
But both the producer and the History Channel said they were aware honing in on a dark chapter in Mormon history rather than doing a broad overview of 19th century Mormonism - their initial idea - would put them on sensitive terrain.
"We'd like to think we are not political here," said Susan Werbe, director of programing for the History Channel. "We look at history with as objective an eye as possible."
And Werbe calls the upbeat conclusion to the show, with ancestors of both sides of the tragedy making peace, "lucky" and "terrific."
Most stories this year about the Mormon experience focused on the wagon train trek and glossed over the reasons it was undertaken. Talley took a different approach, exploring the violent and sometimes fatal conflicts between Mormons and non-Mormons that forced the Mormons to migrate to the Great Basin and which continued after they arrived.
The program casts Mormons as the victims in their first settlements in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois, as their clannishness and peculiar practices, including polygamy, made them a political and economic threat to outsiders.
Seeking refuge, the Mormons finally fled the United States in 1847 and settled in the isolated Salt Lake Valley where they could establish a theocratic "Kingdom of God" without outside interference.
But the seclusion wouldn't last. By 1857, federal troops were marching to Utah to quell what Mormon antagonists had claimed was a rebellion against the government. And when the Mormons got word, they vowed not to be driven from their homes again.
"I will fight until there is not a drop of blood in my veins," early Mormon leader and polygamist Heber C. Kimball is quoted as saying. "Good God, I have wives enough to whip the United States."
Talley said Mormonism's early conflicts with outsiders set the stage for the Utah War and that confrontation's innocent casualties: A wagon train of non-Mormon Arkansas immigrants passing through the Utah Territory en route to California.
The Baker-Fancher wagon train arrived amid the war hysteria and for reasons still unknown incurred the wrath of Mormon settlers and Indians as they traveled along the old Spanish Trail through southwestern Utah.
In early September 1857, while camped in a meadow about 40 miles west of Cedar City, the wagon train was surrounded by paranoid Mormons and angry Paiute Indians, who, under the guise of a flag of truce, shot, knifed and beat to death an estimated 120 men, women and children. Some 18 children under six were spared.
While the massacre and its aftermath make for dramatic television, Talley said the event is the focal point of the program because it drives home the struggle Americans have gone through to define the freedoms and rights the country was founded on.
"Of course it is an interesting story. But it's much, much more than that," he said. "The hope is that through the drama of it all comes this deeper realization of what these events have meant for us."
Historians generally agree that one of the local Mormon leaders involved, John Doyle Lee, was an unwilling scapegoat for the church when he was convicted and executed for the massacre in 1877.
But Talley said he found no real consensus among historians about what actually happened at Mountain Meadows and who should have taken the blame: the Mormons, the Indians, the federal government, Mormon leader Brigham Young or Lee.
But the most moving interviews he taped were not with historians, but with two men with a personal stake in the tragedy.
Vernon Lee, a great-great grandson of John D. Lee, and Ron Loving, whose great-great uncle was wagon train leader Alexander Fancher, crossed paths in the 1980s in their search for the truth and for reconciliation.
The documentary praises their effort to erect a monument on a hillside above the meadow in 1990 in an attempt to heal old wounds left open more than a century after the unexplained tragedy.
The monument simply states the Arkansas wagon train was massacred and lists the names of the victims. Historical background or assigning blame was intentionally left out, said Loving, a 58-year-old aerospace engineer living in Tucson, Ariz.
"If it's a grave marker, why put something there that's controversial?" he asked. "To me and a lot of other people, that is hallowed ground out there."