Before texts, tracking numbers, and two-day shipping, a letter could take months to cross the continent, assuming it arrived at all. In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan saddle up for the tangled story of Mormons, mail, freighting, and power in the American West, from Brigham Young’s ambitious Y.X. Company and the political chaos of the …
Tag: Brigham Young
Episode 163: The Old Salt Lake Theatre
While Eastern theaters staged plays depicting Mormons as bloodthirsty polygamists, Brigham Young was building a Drury Lane replica in the Utah desert. It would go on to host Oscar Wilde, the Barrymore family across four generations, and Brigham Young’s own son performing in drag to packed houses. It was the most ambitious act of cultural …
Episode 162: Madam Pattirini Built Utah
What do Brigham Young’s flamboyant son, a legendary local gin, the University of Utah, the Huntsman Center, and a web of Mormon architecture all have in common? In this episode, Lindsay and Bryan follow one gloriously weird thread through Utah history, from Madam Pattirini, the stage persona of Brigham Morris Young, to the family empire …
Episode 159: Books of the Massacre
A long overdue Books of Mormons Report, and we’re making it an episode. Lindsay and Bryan trace how the Mountain Meadows Massacre got written about, argued over, buried, resurrected, and fought over again, from Judge John Cradlebaugh and Major James Carleton’s early investigations, to decades of institutional silence and PR cleanup, to Juanita Brooks’ landmark …
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 …