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Lee that if he did not help deliver the wagon train party to the Indians’ justice, then the Mormons would be endangered as a result. In any event, shortly after the messenger had left to consult Brigham Young, a group of Mormons and Indians carried out an attack on the Baker-Fancher party. The battle went on for days, and as a way of ending it, Lee told the tribesmen that if they would allow the women and children to escape unharmed, the Mormons would allow the slaughter of the migrant men. The Indians, Lee said, agreed, and he then convinced the Baker-Fancher group that if its survivors would surrender, they would be allowed to leave the area. Lee marched the male emigrants out of the encampment first, and a signal was given the Indians to begin their killing. But as soon as the slaughter started, the assailants lost control, and when the bloodbath was over, over one hundred men, women, and children lay dead in the Utah dirt. Many of them had been killed with unnecessary brutality.
    Lee was found guilty for his part in the slaughter by an all-Mormon jury and was sentenced to death.
    J OHN D. L EE WOULD NOT BE THE FIRST MAN to be legally executed in the Utah territory, but no man before him and no man after him—until my brother, one hundred years later—had such a keen understanding of the meaning of Utah’s death penalty. In the early 1850s, when the Mormon-dominated territorial legislature was drafting a criminal code, it designed a punishment for first-degree murder that would specifically satisfy the doctrine of Blood Atonement: Those who were condemned to death could choose between the options of being shot to death by a firing squad or being beheaded (the latter choice was eliminated in 1888, because—not surprisingly—nobody ever opted for it). Or, for those who were a little less anxious to have their blood shed, or who might simply be non-Mormon, there was always the possibility of a non-enlightened death: a simple hanging. As it turned out, a fair amount of blood ended up getting spilled. From the late 1840s to 1977, roughly fifty men wereexecuted in Utah: eight by hanging, one reportedly by disemboweling, two by undocumented means; the remaining thirty-nine were shot by firing squads. Obviously, several other states—notably, ones in the South—executed greater numbers of men during the same period. None, though, would put to death so many by a means that so pointedly resulted in the spilling of blood, and no other state in the Union had a capital punishment code that prescribed its methods of death according to religious doctrine.
    When Lee was given the choice of the mode of execution, he chose according to his faith: He chose to be shot.
    On March 23, 1877, Lee was taken to the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. “I do not fear death,” he said that morning. “I shall never go to a worse place than I am now in.” Then, after he denounced Brigham Young for leading the Mormons astray from the teachings of Joseph Smith, Lee added: “I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner. I cannot help it. It is my last word—it is so.” (Later, after hearing a report of Lee’s words, Brigham Young—in the manner of the Book of Mormon’s Lord God—cursed Lee and all his generations to come.)
    Lee sat back down on his coffin and spoke his final words: “Center my heart, boys. Don’t mangle my body.”
    The executioners obliged the request. They fired their bullets in close formation through John D. Lee’s heart, and he fell back across his coffin. His blood spilled into the Utah soil, where the blood of the massacre’s victims had spilled a generation before, and then his body was placed in the wooden casket and given to his family for burial.
    The whole affair had been another violent turning point in the Mormon world. The massacre had been disgraceful, and so was the way that Lee was used to relieve the Mormon structure of its culpability in the matter. (Eighty-four years later, the