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  • House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre
  • Robert V. Wells
House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. By Shannon A. Novak (Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 2008) 226 pp. $29.95

On September 11, 1857, about 120 men, women, and children on their way from Arkansas to California were massacred at Mountain Meadows, Utah, following a five-day siege by Paiute Indians and local Mormons. Seventeen children considered too young to testify about the event were spared. Bodies were buried in shallow graves that did not protect them from predators. In 1859, an Army detachment collected scattered bones, interred them more securely, and erected the first of several monuments. The history of what exactly happened and why has been contested ever since.

In August 1999, renovation of the site unearthed around 2,600 bones and fragments of at least twenty-eight separate individuals. Novak, a forensic anthropologist, with experience examining bones in contexts ranging from fifteenth-century battles to mass graves in twentieth-century Croatia, was asked to examine the remains from Mountain Meadows to see how they might offer "bounds [to] the process, preventing an endless proliferation of competing accounts" (xiv). Unfortunately, she had only a month to work before the remains were to be re-interred.

Although Novak recognizes that "the bones cannot settle the matter of what really happened at Mountain Meadows, or who is to blame," she also believes that such physical remains "appear to be beyond politics and thus capable of closing off debate" (xiv–xv). For example, skulls show individuals killed by gunshots and blunt-force trauma consistent with executions at close quarters. No wounds from arrows or knives, or evidence of scalping were found. Early Mormon efforts to portray the victims as wild, undisciplined, and provocative men from Missouri are undercut by many remains of women and children. Novak also uses census and genealogical works to show that about 70 percent of the party was comprised of two extended "core" families; another thirty individuals were their friends and neighbors. Claims that the women were prostitutes are challenged by the absence of bone lesions associated with venereal diseases. Many bones had been chewed by animals.

Novak notes that histories of the massacre rarely discuss the victims before they reached Utah, and not much even at that point. She devotes a significant part of this book to humanizing and personalizing the victims by examining how they lived in Arkansas. She combines a variety of primary and secondary sources to describe their homesteads, family ties, occupations, and other social patterns. But she makes no mention of the possible involvement of Mormons from Missouri and Arkansas in prior deaths. The bones also speak in these cases, often telling of malnutrition and occupational injuries. Several teeth suggest that some of the migrants who died had Native American ancestry. [End Page 119]

Novak's book is engaging, despite the uneven and incomplete nature of her evidence. Familiarity with the basic outlines of the massacre and its historiography is necessary to appreciate fully some of her conclusions. This work will appeal more to specialists than to general readers. The value of Novak's forensic anthropology, her most interesting innovation, is limited, since it focuses more on results than methods. "Biocultural" in the title presumably refers to biology, but, given the nature of the work, could easily mean biography.

Robert V. Wells
Union College
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