August 26, 2007
The True Story Behind September Dawn Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:15 AM EST A controversial new movie opened this week. September Dawn is a retelling of the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the 1857 incident in which Mormon settlers killed over a hundred Americans bound for California. I had been planning to see the film, as the episode it recounts is a pretty fascinating and disturbing tale of the nineteenth-century American West. Then word came out in the New York Times that it’s an overwrought melodrama built around a weak, contrived love story. I imagine that judgment might be a little harsh, but suffice it to say I’m not tripping over myself to reach a theater near me. In assessing September Dawn, The New York Times mostly focuses on the cinematic and narrative qualities of the film, rather than closely examining the accuracy of its historical information. This might seem like a dodge, but after reading Roger Ebert’s review of the same movie, the Times’s restraint looks admirable. Ebert’s review is a mishmash of political statements, speculations about the filmmakers’ motives, and incoherent meditations on the nature of religious strife. After declaring that the movie must either be an allegory about 9/11 or a hit job on the Mormon presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Ebert comes uncomfortably close to saying that it is socially irresponsible to depict the Mountain Meadows Massacre. “There isn’t anything to be gained in telling the story in this way,” Ebert writes. “It generates bad feelings on all sides, and, at a time when Mormons are at pains to explain they are Christians, underlines the way that these Mormons consider all Christians to be ‘gentiles.’” The problem with what Ebert writes is that, regardless of the very real challenges contemporary Mormons might face, the Mountain Meadows Massacre actually was an appalling product of paranoia and militant religious separatism. Finding a place for Mormons in the expanding United States was no insignificant challenge for the young republic, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre was profoundly disruptive to that process. I don’t know whether September Dawn tells this story in an acceptable or unacceptable way. But even the nicest Hollywood gloss couldn’t take the ugliness out of this episode, the known details of which have actually gotten worse as time has gone by. This is all a longwinded way of saying that, while critics are bound to consider this film in the context of present-day politics and may, like Ebert, shy away from the most unpleasant facts of the events of September 11, 1857, viewers might want to give those facts another look. Fortunately, one can do so without leaving this website. I recommend the articles here, here, here, and here—at least for starters.
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