Coggins7 wrote:Here are some highly aggravated people who snapped and committed an atrocity against people who had nothing to do with past outrages.
They did not "snap." The Fancher party was under siege for several days before the massacre. The Mormons had meetings and deliberated long and hard before coming up with a plan to wipe out the Fancher party -- and, in the end, they chose to use subterfuge to coax out the unarmed settlers in order to murder them in cold blood. This was not a crime of passion, but a premediated and deliberative slaughter of whole families.
I've never known any LDS apologists, of any stature, who have justified their actions.
As late as Dec. 1, 1869 (over 12 years after the massacre), the
Deseret News was still editorializing that the immigrants' behavior caused the attack (which, of course, the writer blamed solely on Indians). And, to this day, apologists cite to the many rumors of wrong-doing by the immigrants, certainly implying the Fancher party brought this on themselves.