Episode 155: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 3

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:05)
George A. Smith, are we really talking about this guy again?

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:08)
We don't have to. We could talk about interesting parts of Mormon history, you know, like the 1920s.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:13)
All right, listen, you, two things. We just talked about that.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:17)
No, still coming down off the 1886 high.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:20)
And we're gonna talk about it again. So second, I know we've devoted too much airtime to A Very Disappointing Man, but that's what Mormon history is. And I'm not just talking about Brigham Young, but this guy, George A. Smith, is a huge part of the story we're talking about.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:37)
So if you're talking about complicated Mormon leaders, you gotta put George Albert Smith, aka George A. Smith, near the top of that list. Sometimes you'll hear him called the father of Southern Utah. If you're like, wait, like George as in St. George? Yeah, yeah, that guy. He helped establish a bunch of settlements down in Southern Utah, but his legacy is also tangled up in one of the most tragic moments in Mormon history, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre will forever be linked to his name.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:04)
Can we also talk about really quick George Albert Smith versus George A. Smith? They're both George Albert Smith. There's a later Mormon prophet, George Albert Smith, that sometimes gets looped in to the frontier guy. So we're calling the George A. Smith, that's our frontier George Albert. So I did not make that at all convoluted.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:26)
We have this history of Mormons loving to recycle names. So you have Ezra T. Benson and then Ezra Taft Benson. Same story. You have Joseph F. Smith, you have Joseph Fielding Smith. Again, same story. Mormons think of different names. You have the whole Old Testament. Like you can name your kid Nebuchadnezzar. There's nothing saying you can't.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:45)
I still think part of it isn't just the patriarchal thing of like fathers naming their sons after them. But when we went to Short Creek, you think the LDS Mormons have a problem with this? The FLDS, all naming their kids and their cousins and their stepbrothers the same thing. And someone told me it was deliberately to make it difficult to track who belonged to whom when the government came in. So there's an argument for that. Okay, but back to our guy, Frontier, George A. Smith. We'll come to the other one later on. His disappointing life story reveals the tensions between religious devotion and political expediency. And we wouldn't know anything about that right now in Southern Utah, would we? It also talks about peaceful colonization and militant resistance and all those things that characterized early Mormon experience in the American West. And that is definitely not peaceful colonization.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:37)
George A is born into a family intimately connected with the founding of the Latter-day Saint movement. Smith rose through church ranks to become a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and later served in the First Presidency under Brigham Young. So, as Joseph Smith's cousin, he'll pop up here and there in early Mormon history, but nothing too big until the Brigham era. His administrative talents and unwavering loyalty make him an ideal figure to spearhead the settlement of southern Utah. And while he's down there, his decisions and actions down there in the summer of 1857 will have lasting and tragic consequences. Understanding his role in all of this requires examining not only his personal biography, but also what else is going on. The broader context of Mormon-Indian relations, territorial politics, and all of these boiling tensions that culminate in the Utah War.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:37)
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:39)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:41)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the Everlasting Hills, straight out of Zion. This isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (4:09)
This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day. Saddle up.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:14)
Gird your loins, lock your hearts, and pay your tithing, because we're bringing you the story of Mormonism in all its paradisiacal glory.

**Bryan Buchanan** (4:22)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:46)
George Albert Smith was born on June 26, 1817 in Potsdam, New York to John Smith and Clarissa Lyman. And his family background places him right in the center of this emerging Latter-day Saint movement. As Bryan mentioned, his first cousin was the prophet himself, Joseph Smith Jr. And despite familial connection, the Smith family was initially raised in the Congregational Church, which was kind of the Protestant, represented the Protestant mainstream of the early 19th century American religious life.