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.I admire Brigham Young more because BrighamYoung was sincere in his belief.Joseph Smith made the whole thingup.Young was a follower of Smith, he always liked Smith, who hada great charisma.And Smith hornswoggled Brigham Young, andBrigham Young was never hornswoggled by anybody else in his life.Madsen 161He was a man of granite will, and hard-nosed and determined, but hebelieved in it.I give him credit for that.He was a very practical man.He was the one that made Mormonism.At the end of Joseph Smith slife, if Brigham Young hadn t taken over, Mormonism would havedisappeared like every other little sect.So you have to admire him asan administrator hard-nosed, certainly, but he created Utah, and theMormon church.So I like him better for that reason. This is a sen-timent that makes it difficult, perhaps, for him to mount an extensivecritique of Young s administrative role in the destruction of Shoshonelifeways and peoples.In analyzing Mormon history, Madsen typically looks at histori-cal incidents and examines the motivations behind them.Non-Mormon historians need to understand, he says, that what droveMormons,  and particularly Brigham Young, was  the fact that theKingdom of God is going to overwhelm the United States governmentand every other government in the world.The Mormon Kingdom ofGod is going to take over.If you don t recognize this in every inci-dent, you don t know what s going on. Madsen credits another ac-quaintance, David L.Bigler, as having clarified this in his work,Forgotten Kingdom.And indeed most gentiles do not understand that the Mormonchurch has been, and remains, deeply committed to its own form ofManifest Destiny and that it is not in the best interest of the churchto expose that commitment.As long as U.S.citizens indulge a vagueanti-Mormon bias, and avoid Mormon history, the LDS church haslittle motivation to disrupt a willful ignoring of its history notwith-standing the Olympics 2002 banners I ducked in the airport, and thecurrent attempt to solicit international commerce for Salt Lake City.Indeed, many outside journalists covering Salt Lake City scrupulouslyavoid saying the word Mormon, for fear of being accused of  perse-cution  which silencing evidently suits the church just fine.So theMountain Meadows Massacre, the Bear River Massacre these aresecrets that get lost in the general cultural hush about Mormonism.And in the midst of these many layers of historical silence, an-other piece of massacre history continues to struggle for recognition.Bigler irritates Madsen (me, too) by insisting on calling the incidenta  battle, and by asserting that the rapes of Shoshone women didnot happen. I said,  Now look, David, you ve seen the evidence Ihave from these Mormon men, who had no motive to say that thishappened or didn t happen.They were in favor of what Connor was162 The Making of Historydoing, most of them.But when they saw what had happened they justhad to report it. Madsen agrees that a possible motive for the unusually clear docu-mentation of this mass rape was the tension between the soldiers andthe Mormon community, particularly regarding sexual behavior.Con-nor had been very public about his disgust for polygyny, and perhapsthe Mormon witnesses had here an opportunity to be equally publicwith their own disgust and moral superiority.But Madsen is less ableto explain the motivation for the rape itself. These were not disci-plined soldiers, he says. Connor did his best to discipline them, butthey were gold miners. And gender politics in the military, he says, arestrained at best. I spent three years in the infantry, Madsen says, and look at all the pinups that s the mildest form of it. It s not justour military, he says, but all armies in the history of the world. Themen reach the point where they don t care.All inhibitions are gone.Well, all armies in some parts of the world, perhaps.Madsen sayshe has found no documented incidents of Shoshone warriors rapingwhite women, despite frequent fears expressed in diaries and letters.But previous to the Bear River incident, there were a number of whitemale outlaws who raped Shoshone women.Mountain men were par-ticularly known for taking Shoshone brides; it is unclear how willingthese brides were to leave their people.Madsen can see why the story of the rape has been deleted fromthe history being presented by the Park Service in their study. Fromthe pragmatic point of view of trying to get the thing through Con-gress, it would be better to leave it out.There will be some peoplewho believe in the military, like the old soldiers at Fort Douglas todaywho refuse to call it a massacre and there are a lot of old soldiers inCongress.I would leave it out too, maybe.It would just be anotherdisturbing element. In an ideal world, though,  I think it should becovered, of course.I covered it. The story is important because  itadds to the whole feeling that this was brutality, barbarism on thepart of the soldiers.Not only did they just kill them and club them todeath, including infants, but they raped the women.In general, however, Madsen feels the Park Service has done  anexcellent job.I don t know how they could do it any better [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]