John Doyle Lee

John D. Lee was a Mormon Church official living in Cedar City, Utah in the 1850’s.  He was the supposed leader of the party that massacred the Arkansas Emigrants at Mountain Meadows in 1857.  He became the scape goat for the Mormon Church and was executed for his role in the incident.  But how did he come to this point?

John Doyle Lee was born in Illinois Territory on September 12, 1812 and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1838.  He came across the Mormon faith via his longtime friend, and founder of the LDS Church, Joseph Smith Jr.  He was set on his path to infamy when he entered the Mormon Church, at which time he became an adopted son of Brigham Young under the Mormon law of adoption.  With this early step, Lee was put on a track to one day become a high ranking Mormon Church official.  In his early years with the church, Lee served as a Danite, which was a vigilante secret society that carried out the needs of the church.  Throughout his years with the Mormon Church (up until the point when the LDS Church turned their backs on him by making him a scapegoat) Lee remained a close friend of and assistant to Brigham Young, the man in charge of the Mormon Church after the passing of Joseph Smith Jr.  This relationship allowed Lee many bonuses, as well as a quick rise to wealth and power within the church.

Lee was also a family man, of sorts.  The Mormon faith includes a belief in polygamy, and therefor Lee had nineteen wives.  In addition to these wives, Lee had fifty six children.  So Lee was a family man in the sense that he had a large family, but in many aspects he barely knew his direct family.  Many of Lee’s wives lived in an entirely different state than Lee for most of the marriage.  There were even instances where a wife would try to visit Lee or spend time with him, and either Brigham Young or Lee himself would dismiss the wife and have her sent back to the place from which she came.

Lee fits into the puzzle that was the Mountain Meadows Massacre in an ambiguous way.  It is widely accepted that Lee was the leader of the party committing the massacre, but Lee is stated as claiming that he was acting reluctantly under direct orders from his commanding militia officers.  Lee accepted responsibility for playing a major role in the massacre, but claims that he himself didn’t kill a single person.  Lee was placed on trial and eventually convicted and sentenced to death.  He was executed by firing squad on the site of the massacre, at Mountain Meadows in 1877.  Up until his death Lee claimed that Brigham Young knew nothing about the pre-meditated massacre until after the events had transpired.  His final words before his execution, as well as his autobiography written shortly before his execution, however, expressed his belief that Young did send orders with the militia officers to have Lee lead the massacre.  Lee was excommunicated from the Mormon Church for his role in the massacre, and wasn’t reinstated to the church until 1961, long after his death.

SOURCE: Lee, John D. Journals of John D. Lee 1846-47 and 1859, ed. Charles Kelly. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1984.