The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mormon Menace, by John Doyle Lee and Alfred Henry Lewis

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Title: The Mormon Menace The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite

Author: John Doyle Lee
        Alfred Henry Lewis

Release Date: November 17, 2007 [EBook #23519]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MORMON MENACE ***

Produced by Bret Blakeslee

THE MORMON MENACE

BEING THE CONFESSION OF JOHN DOYLE LEE - DANITE

AN OFFICIAL ASSASSIN OF THE MORMON CHURCH UNDER THE LATE BRIGHAM YOUNG

INTRODUCTION By
ALFRED HENRY LEWIS

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS

New York Home Protection Publishing Co. 156 Fifth Avenue

Copyright, 1905, by
A. B. NICHOLS

All Rights Reserved

electrotyped and printed by the Herald Company of Binghamtom

CONTENTS (pages not numbered in text version)

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v

CHAPTER I - THE STORMY YOUTH OF LEE. . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

CHAPTER II - LEE BEGINS A CAREER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

CHAPTER III - LEE BECOMES A MORMON . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

CHAPTER IV - THE SAINTS BESET WITH TROUBLES. . . . . . . . . 29

CHAPTER V - THE MORMON WAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

CHAPTER VI - LEE LOCATES THE GARDEN OF EDEN. . . . . . . . . 45

CHAPTER VII - THE SAINTS GATHER AT NAUVOO. . . . . . . . . . 52

CHAPTER VIII - LEE AS A MISSIONARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

CHAPTER IX - MORMONISM AND ITS ORIGIN. . . . . . . . . . . . 67

CHAPTER X - LEE CASTS OUT DEVILS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

CHAPTER XI - HOT FOR LEE IN TENNESSEE. . . . . . . . . . . . 78

CHAPTER XII - OF PECULIAR INTEREST IN NAUVOO . . . . . . . . 86

CHAPTER XIII - DEATH OF JOSEPH SMITH . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

CHAPTER XIV - THE DOCTRINE OF SEALING. . . . . . . . . . . . 99

CHAPTER XV - THE SAINTS TURN WESTWARD. . . . . . . . . . . .104

CHAPTER XVI - LEE GOES TO SANTA FE . . . . . . . . . . . . .110

CHAPTER XVII - LEE IS TREATED BADLY BY THE BRETHREN. . . . .119

CHAPTER XVIII - THE DANITE AND HIS DUTY. . . . . . . . . . .129

CHAPTER XIX - THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS . . . . . . . . . . . . .139

CHAPTER XX - THE MUSTER OF THE DANITES . . . . . . . . . . .146

CHAPTER XXI - THE BLOOD FEAST OF THE DANITES . . . . . . . .151

CHAPTER XXII - THE DANITE CHIEF REPORTS TO BRIGHAM . . . . .157

CHAPTER XXIII - LEE NEARS THE END. . . . . . . . . . . . . .161

APPENDIX I - BLOOD ATONEMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .166

APPENDIX II - THE STORY OF LEE'S ARREST. . . . . . . . . . .168

APPENDIX III - DEATH OF JOHN DOYLE LEE . . . . . . . . . . .173

ILLUSTRATIONS (not included in text version)

The Mountain Meadows ii

The Danite 36

The Mormon Preacher 60

The Blood Atonement 138

John Doyle Lee 150

INTRODUCTION

THE MORMON PURPOSE

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 Meadows 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 those long prison weeks which fell in between his arrest and execution, Lee wrote his life, giving 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, down to those murders for which he, Lee, was executed. Lee's confessions, so to call them, were published within a few months following his death. The disclosures were such that the Mormon Church became alarmed; the book might mean its downfall. In the name of Mormon safety Brigham Young, by money and other agencies, succeeded in the book's suppression. What copies had been sold were, as much as might be, bought up and destroyed, together with the plates and forms from which they had been printed.

In the destruction of this literature, so perilous to Mormons, at least two volumes escaped. These have been placed in my hands by certain patriotic influences, and are here reprinted as The Mormon Menace. Much that was shocking and atrocious has been eliminated in the editing, as unfit for modest ears and eyes. What remains, however, will give a sufficient picture of the Mormon Church in its hateful attitude towards all that is moral or republican among our people. A black kitten makes a black cat; what the Mormon Church was under President Young it is under President Smith, and will be with their dark successors.

The purpose of the present publication of Lee's story is to warn American men, and more particularly American women, of the Mormon viper still coiled upon the national hearth. To-day, as in the days of Lee, the Mormon missionary is abroad in the world. He is in your midst; he makes his converts among your neighbors; within the month, on one detected occasion, he stood at the portals of your public schools and gave his insidious pamphlets, preaching Mormonism, into the hands of your children.

More, the Mormon Church has, in addition to its religious, its political side, and teaches not only immorality, but treason. On a far-away 5th of November a certain darksome Guy Fawkes and his confederates, all with a genius for explosives, planned to blow up the British Government by blowing up its parliament, and went some distance towards carrying out their plot. The Mormon Church of Latter-day Saints, with headquarters in Salt Lake City, is employed upon a present and somewhat similar conspiracy against this Government, with Senator Smoot as the advance guard or agent thereof in the halls of our national legislature.

As this is written, a Senate inquiry into this conspiracy wags slowly yet searchingly forward. Stripped of formality of phrase and reset in easier English, the question which the Senate Committee is trying to solve is this: Is the Mormon Church in