In 1856, Brigham Young received word of a group of Latter-day Saints stuck on the plains and in need of assistance. This letter and the response has become known as the handcart rescue. Do you want to summarize for us a little bit about what that was? In 1856, a group of handcart pioneers, a couple of companies, the Willie company and the Martin company, along with their supporting wagon company, got stuck in an early winter snowstorm. And because of that snowstorm and the lack of food with the company, they were both starving to death and freezing to death. They had abandoned some of their clothing along the way in order to lighten their loads. And at this point, they realized a mistake had been made with that as well. So when word got to Salt Lake City that these companies were stuck on the plains, Brigham Young immediately called people together in conference and told them to stop meeting and get out there and start acting. He said that all of their prayers and faith would do no good unless they actually took some action to assist these people. So members of the Church began to take their clothing, their food, their teams, and their horses and send them out to these parties of people who needed rescuing out on the plains. And they brought many of them in safely. And this is really a heroic rescue, right? There were people--the rescuers are putting their own lives in danger to do this. It did require unselfishness on the part of the people who provided the supplies. And it particularly required sacrifice on the part of the people who went out, because they were out in an area where if they got in trouble, they might lose their lives themselves. In 1857, Brigham Young got another letter, this time from southern Utah, saying a group of non-Latter-day Saint immigrants were passing through the area. And they wanted to know what Brigham Young thought they should do about it. Brigham Young responded immediately and said, "Let them go. Don't do anything." Events continued to spiral, and this became the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Can you tell us a little bit more about the massacre? In this case, there was a period of war. And those war tensions caused otherwise good people in southern Utah to begin to behave in a way exactly opposite to how they behaved in Salt Lake the year before. Instead of reacting with love, instead of sacrificing their own goods, instead of trying to help these immigrants who were passing through, they reacted in a way that ultimately led to a disaster, to the massacring of 120 men, women, and children under a white flag. It was the worst event in the history of the Church. It was the worst event in the history of Utah. And it was the result of this downward spiraling that occurred when they first began to treat these immigrants as the other and not as human beings to be treated with respect. And that led to a result that in retrospect was absolutely unthinkable. People couldn't understand why they did what they did. And so they reacted with fear. They heard all of these rumors, they heard all of these things, that these people are going to come from the outside and hurt us like they've done before, and so we're going to attack instead of reacting with Christlike love. Yes. And mass killings like the Mountain Meadows Massacre generally follow a particular pattern. That pattern includes listening to rumors about people that later turn out not to be true. So I think there's a lesson to be learned in that. Rather than listen to rumors about people who are different from ourselves and assume that those rumors are true, we ought to dismiss them and react with love and compassion and a sense of unselfishness. And this is the same group of people that had themselves been sufferers of persecution. They knew what it was like to be other, and yet they reacted in this negative way. That was the great irony. Instead of reacting as people who had been persecuted, knowing how to help other people who needed assistance, they reacted in the way their persecutors had reacted. The result was not only an individual disaster but also a community disaster, community guilt. Some of these people who carried out the Mountain Meadows Massacre carried the burden and the guilt of this to their deaths. I think particularly of Nephi Johnson, who, on his deathbed, repeatedly called out "blood." Because in his mind, he never overcame what he saw as a relatively young man and being a participant in that event. We don't talk about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We've tried to hide it for many, many years. Why is this? Why don't we talk about it? I think collectively, the reason is that it's the worst incident in our history and is therefore painful, and people try to avoid pain. So I think that the reaction of Church members when they hear about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, or if they have ancestors who participated in it, has been first of all to avoid it, avoid it by hiding it. And if they can't avoid it by hiding it, then perhaps the second way they do it sometimes is denial. Then the next reaction that people have to something is to try to somehow or another put it into a form that's explainable. And with the Mountain Meadows Massacre, that's been scapegoating people. In particular, people have tried to blame it on the local Indians of southern Utah, who have borne a terrible burden for many years and been persecuted for this purported role that they had in the massacre. And then after that, it's to try to isolate it onto one person, even though this was group violence. So John D. Lee and his family have taken a disproportionate share of the blame over the years for something that was actually community violence or group violence. So what do we do with circumstances that are like this? I think the best and really the only way that we can deal with circumstances like this is to look at them in their entirety and look at them honestly and then see what we can learn from them both individually and as a community. And what lesson do you think we should learn from this? On the individual level, I think how we react to others, how we consider them in our minds, is extremely important. If we choose to act in a Christlike manner and reach out to people, even in a spirit of self-sacrifice, that creates an upward spiral that eventually takes us to where we are not only benefiting others, but we ourselves are being strengthened in the process. If we go the opposite direction and spiral downward by beginning to treat people with suspicion, beginning to treat them as though they are the other, then that suspicion eventually leads to a confirmation of suspicion. It becomes a self-reinforcing prophecy. And then once you begin to see another person as an enemy, you begin to treat them as an enemy. And the result, ultimately, is that you end up in conflict, in the case of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in a horrible conflict that led to complete destruction of people who never should have been hurt. So what should we learn about this as a group, as Latter-day Saints in general? Well, one thing I think we can learn is the importance of councils. When it came to rescuing the handcart pioneers, people got together. They counseled together on the best way to send supplies and people out there to help them. In the case of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, each time a council met and considered the details and included the collective wisdom of the group, the decision that was made was generally good. When people then left those councils and tried to operate independently or in small groups that didn't like the consensus of the council, then the circumstances tended to get worse. So we can celebrate their handcart rescue and learn valuable lessons from it, but we should also remember the Mountain Meadows Massacre so we learn important lessons from that, as well? Exactly. The massacre has things to teach us about the past. And I also think that just as we grieve for Latter-day Saints of the past who were killed through persecution, I think we likewise need to grieve for those who died senselessly in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We need to remember them. We need to honor them.