The Wine-dark Sea of Grass By Marilyn Brown Salt Press (Springville, Utah), 2001. Hardcover: 393 pages. ISBN: 1-55517-529-5 Suggested retail price: $24.95 (US)
Reviewed by: Morgan B. Adair

How could good people do something so horrible? When that question was first asked by those investigating the killing of over 120 immigrants in the tragedy known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the response was denial: "We didn't do it. It was the Indians." Once the essential facts of the Massacre came to light, anti-Mormon writers provided a different answer: "They were not good people." With the ball back in the Mormon court, the next phase was rationalization: "It was not such a bad thing." There was an army approaching. We were in a war. Members of the Fancher train (and the preceding wagon train, the "Missouri Wildcats") incited the Indians to uprising, and they had to be killed to placate the Indians.

The Massacre has been dealt with in anti-Mormon fiction, but Marilyn Brown's The Wine-Dark Sea of Grass is the first novel that I'm aware of that focuses on the Massacre from the Mormon perspective. Another novel was just released: Ferry Woman: A Novel of John D. Lee and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Gerald Grimmett, Limberlost Press. Yet another is forthcoming: Red Water, by Judith Freeman (author of A Desert of Pure Feeling), possibly from a major publisher.

Brown has made an effort to make her story historically accurate, but sometimes accepts rumors that put the immigrants in a negative light. Take, for example, the rumor that the "Missouri Wildcats" poisoned a spring, resulting in the death of livestock. Proctor Robinson died after skinning one of the dead cattle, the poison supposedly being transmitted when he rubbed his eye. This rumor circulated after the massacre as an example of the outrages committed by immigrants traveling through Utah that incited the Mormon anger that was misdirected against the Fanchers. The authoritative source on the massacre, Juanita Brooks's The Mountain Meadows Massacre, notes that a much more likely explanation is that Robinson died of a bacterial infection from skinning a decaying carcass, and that the cattle died of natural causes. Nevertheless, Brown treats Robinson's death as if caused by the Missourians.

As one reads through the list of names and ages of those killed in the Massacre, one notices that the party consisted mostly of young families. For the most part, Brown depicts the party as a faceless crowd, "like a river." The one exception is a man and his pregnant wife that the protagonist, Jacob, talks to on the road. Coincidentally, this is the man that Jacob is expected to kill in the massacre. Members of the immigrant train were disarmed, then walked, single file, back toward Cedar City. After walking a short distance, the command was given to halt, and each of the Mormons was to kill the immigrant at his side. Brown's description of the massacre doesn't capture the horror of the tragedy. Most of the people killed are part of the faceless crowd. When the order was given, Jacob "saw the men of the Fancher train thudding to the ground." His attention immediately turns to the man he is supposed to kill, who is attempting to wrest Jacob's gun away from him. For Jacob, what was to be a massacre suddenly became a struggle for his life. The killing of this man, the only one of the immigrants who is not faceless, is done in self-defense. The man dies asking that question, "How could? . . ."

Brown correctly places John D. Lee near the front of the column, behind a wagonload of sick and wounded immigrants. Jacob is shocked when he sees Lee killing them, but realizes that no one who could tell what happened could be left alive.

In depicting the Massacre, Brown could take a lesson from Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The opening scene, perhaps the most effective depiction of the horror of war ever made, succeeds by giving many details in rapid succession. In comparison, Brown has given us a wide-angle view. Details of the massacre that Brown could have drawn on have been preserved in the accounts of both the Mormon participants and children who survived. For example, Mary Elizabeth "Sallie" Baker was 5 years old at the time of the Massacre:

Sallie Baker recalled she was sitting on her father's lap when the same bullet that killed him nicked her ear, leaving a scar forever. The bloodshed was imprinted on Sallie's memory for the rest of her life. Only her words can begin to describe her feelings. She was eighty-five years old and still remembered:

But even when you're that young you don't forget the horror of having you father gasp for breath and grow limp, while you have your arms around his neck, screaming with terror. You don't forget the blood curdling war whoops and the banging of guns all around you. You don't forget the screaming of the other children and the agonized shrieks of women being hacked to death with tomahawks. And you wouldn't forget it, either, if you saw your own mother topple over in the wagon beside you, with a big red splotch getting bigger on the front of her calico dress. . . .

One of the Mormons ran up to the wagon, raised his gun and said, "Lord my God, receive their spirits, it is for thy Kingdom that I do this." Then he fired at the wounded man who was leaning against another man, killing them both with the same bullet.

A 14 year-old boy came running up toward our wagon, and the driver, who was a Mormon, hit him over the head with the butt end of his gun, crushing the boy's skull. A young girl about 11 years old, all covered with blood, was running toward the wagon when an Indian fired at her point blank. (Anna Jean Backus, Mountain Meadows Witness: The Life and Times of Bishop Philip Klingensmith, 136-7)

Brown shifts the point of view of the narrative several times in the novel. Each chapter begins with the name of the character from whose point of view that chapter is told. Brown could have used this technique to make a very powerful book, just by including one more point of view, that of one of the members of the Fancher party. Imagine seeing the massacre from the point of view of a 5 or 6 year-old child whose lack of comprehension of events only adds to the terror they feel. Then imagine how they would feel, after watching their family killed by the Mormons, being given to a Mormon family to be cared for.

Although the cover of the book and my review thus far might lead you to believe that The Wine-Dark Sea of Grass is a novel about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, that is not really the case. The Massacre is a backdrop to the actual story, a story of obsessive love between Elizabeth and John D. Lee, and between Jacob and Elizabeth, who ends up marrying Jacob's father, J.B. Polygamy complicates many of the marriages in the novel, just as it did in real life. Much of the novel seems to be from the romance genre, so I'll have to leave that part of it for someone more familiar with that genre to review.

Finally, a note on the printing. While the book is nicely bound and has an attractive dust jacket, there are problems with the printed text. There is almost no bottom margin -- the text comes within 1/4 to 1/8 inch of the bottom of the page, and on many pages, the text is printed slightly crooked.

While I enjoy reading history, I believe literature has a greater potential to let us imagine the feelings and motivations of others and explore human complexity. In telling the Mountain Meadows story from the Mormon point of view, Marilyn Brown has told us that this horrible thing happened, that good people did it, and somehow they continued to be good people. I'm confident that the answer to how this could happen could be found by unraveling the complexities of human nature, but I haven't found that answer yet.