The Mormon Menace Being the Confession of John Doyle Lee, Danite, an Official Assassin of the Mormon Church Under the Late Brigham Young (Hardcover)

1905. With numerous illustrations. Lewis writes in the Introduction: Almost a half century ago, being in 1857, John Doyle Lee, a chief among that red brotherhood, the Danites, was ordered by Brigham Young and the leading counselors of the Mormon Church to take his men and murder a party of emigrants then on their way through Utah to California. The Mormon orders were to kill all who can talk, and, in their carrying out, Lee and his Danites, with certain Indians whom he had recruited in the name of scalps and pillage, slaughtered over one hundred and twenty men, women and children and left their stripped bodies to the elements and the wolves. This wholesale murder was given the title of The Mountain Meadow Massacre. Twenty years later, in 1877, the belated justice of this Government seated Lee on his coffin, and shot him to death for his crimes. In addition to writing about his life, Lee also gives among other matters the story of the Church of Mormon from its inception, when Joseph Smith pretended, with the aid of Urim and Thummim, to translate the golden plates. Lewis then goes on to allege that in the name of Mormon safety, Brigham Young, by money and other agencies worked to have the book suppressed.