When family secrets meet frontier justice: A murder that shattered a Mormon community Join Lindsay Hansen Park and journalist Daniel H. Neal for a conversation about his new book No Forgiveness—a true crime story that’s part family reckoning, part historical excavation. On a summer morning in 1911, two polygamous Mormon neighbors stood in an Idaho …
Category: Podcasts
Episode 157: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 5
The story shifts from tension to bloodshed. September 1857, Mountain Meadows, southern Utah where a wagon train of emigrant families was betrayed under a flag of truce and massacred by Mormon settlers and their allies. In this episode, we unravel the deception, the chain of command, and the sacred language that cloaked an atrocity in …
Episode 156: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 4
In September 1857, southern Utah became the stage for one of the darkest tragedies in American frontier history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This was no spontaneous clash but a calculated act of religious extremism and territorial paranoia that left 120 emigrants from the Baker-Fancher party dead, while Mormon leaders shifted blame onto Southern Paiute tribes. …
Episode 155: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 3
Just when we thought we’d talked enough about disappointing Mormon men, George A. Smith pulls us back in. In this unflinching episode, we unpack how the so-called “Father of Southern Utah” helped lay the groundwork for one of the darkest moments in LDS history, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. With a wig in one hand and …
Episode 154: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 2
In Part Two of “The Summer of Conspiracy,” we follow Apostle George A. Smith on his fateful southern tour, an incendiary road trip of sermons, war councils, and covert diplomacy that would ignite the powder keg of Mountain Meadows. As Smith carries Brigham Young’s orders through the frontier, we trace how military drills, apocalyptic sermons, …
Episode 153: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Pt. 1
In our most incendiary episode yet, “The Summer of Conspiracy” rips open the shocking truth of how Mormon leaders, consumed by apocalyptic terror and drunk on prophetic power, weaponized an entire territory in the blood-soaked summer of 1857. When the federal government came knocking, Brigham Young and his zealot lieutenants didn’t just declare war, they …
Episode 152: FIELD TRIP: Coffin Canes
What do you get when you combine martyrdom, relic worship, secret reburials, and a healing cane made from a coffin? Mormon history at its weirdest and most fascinating. In this special on-site episode of the Sunstone Mormon History Podcast, Lindsay and Bryan take you on a field trip into the curious afterlife of Joseph Smith’s …
Episode 150: The Steptoe Expedition
In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan unravel the Steptoe Expedition, a moment of uneasy calm before the storm of the Utah War and Mountain Meadows Massacre. What began as a military survey spiraled into scandal, seduction, and cultural collision, as Lieutenant Sylvester Mowry set his sights on Mary Ann Ayers Young (Brigham’s daughter-in-law!) and ignited …
Episode 149: The Handcart Disaster
What happens when spiritual ambition meets logistical failure? In this episode, we dig into the catastrophic 1856 Mormon handcart disaster, when Brigham Young’s promise of a faster, cheaper, holier way to Zion led to starvation, frostbite, and mass death. Stripping away pioneer kitsch and faith-promoting folklore, Lindsay and Bryan uncover the real story of financial …
Episode 148: The Gathering
Mormonism has always dreamed big and in this episode, we dive into one of its boldest and most disastrous dreams: the great gathering of Zion. Lindsay and Bryan pull apart the myth and the machinery behind Brigham Young’s plan to build a literal Kingdom of God in the American West, fueled by prophecies, poverty, and, …