author
John Doyle Lee
1812–1877
A striking and controversial figure of the American West, this early Latter-day Saint pioneer is remembered less for frontier settlement than for his role in one of the darkest episodes in Utah history. His life story moves from conversion, migration, and church leadership to trial, conviction, and execution after the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
1 Audiobook
The Mormon Menace: The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite
by John Doyle Lee, Alfred Henry Lewis
About the author
Born in Illinois in 1812, John Doyle Lee joined the Latter Day Saint movement in the 1830s and became an active participant in its turbulent early years. He followed the church through Missouri and Nauvoo and later into Utah, where he served in a number of civic and religious roles during the settlement period.
Lee remains most closely associated with the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a wagon train of emigrants was attacked in southern Utah. Historians and reference works consistently identify him as a central participant; he was later excommunicated, tried, convicted, and in 1877 executed by firing squad at the massacre site.
Because of that history, Lee is remembered as both a frontier settler and one of the most debated figures in early Mormon and western American history. His story appears often in accounts of the Utah Territory, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the conflicts that shaped the nineteenth-century American West.