American Primeval and the Mountain Meadows Massacre - Mormon Historians React | Ep. 1983

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2025

⏱️ 122 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

January 9 saw the release of a new Netflix series, American Primeval, set in the context of mid-19th-century Utah. Though the series is fictionalized, many of the events and peoples depicted are real, including the Utah War, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Mormon settlers, and the Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute Indians.

Historians Barbara Jones Brown and Darren Parry join host John Dehlin for this live podcast to answer viewer's questions about which aspects of the series are factual and which are historical fiction. Barbara is co-author of Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath, and Darren is the author of The Bear River Massacre: A Shoshone History. Barbara and Darren offer a unique perspective because they are not only historians of this time period in Utah, they are direct descendants of peoples depicted in the mini-series--Darren is Northwestern Shoshone, and Barbara is a descendant of perpetrators of the horrific massacre at Mountain Meadows.

Show Notes

YouTube

00:00:00 Intro

00:06:25 Photos of ancestors

00:14:15 The creators did not intend this to be historically accurate

00:23:55 We need to debunk that this was done by the Native Americans, it was NOT

00:33:45 Jim Bridger’s character was the funnest character in the show

00:42:45 Brigham Young (Kim Coates) what is right and wrong

00:47:40 Jedediah M. Grant and the Mormon Reformation

00:57:25 Elias Higbee and John M. Higbee

01:07:45 Mountain Meadows started as a cattle raid

01:18:50 Made up fiction from the Nauvoo Legion

01:26:11 Two Moons - great female lead who had had her tongue cut out

01:30:40 Red Feather

01:35:00 Winter Bird - Strong female character

01:39:10 Sarah Rowell and Devin Rowell - neither were Mormon, main characters,

01:43:20 Jacob Pratt and Abish Pratt were both Mormon

01:46:55 Wild Bill Hickman - member of the Nauvoo Legion

01:51:20 What Barbara said about the missed opportunity in the TV show

01:55:00 Ned Blackhawk

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host
0:05.0	John DeLinn. It is January 14th, 2025. And today we are here to talk about American prime
0:13.4	evil. It is, I don't know, last I checked, the number one show or movie on Netflix, it's a doozy. It's allegedly, purportedly,
0:26.0	about the American West, especially in Utah, during 1857-ish time frame. And it's got Mormons,
0:35.0	it's got Brigham Young, it's got the Shoshone, Native Americans,
0:38.9	it's got Mormon history. And so many people are watching this show, but they're also asking
0:46.8	how much of this show, American Prime Evil, is actual U.S. history versus a dramatization.
0:56.2	And so we love to do sort of these Mormon, Mormons respond episodes because we like the world
1:03.5	to know how Mormons kind of react to discussions of them in the public arena.
1:18.6	And having her back for multiple times now on Mormon Stories podcast, we're so thrilled. This was Barbara Jones Brown's idea.
1:21.6	She reached out to me and said, hey, John, let's do an episode on this.
1:25.6	And I'm so thrilled to have you back, Barbara. Thanks for joining us.
1:28.4	And I said, you've got to bring on Darren Perry as well.
1:30.7	Yeah, yeah.
1:31.6	Yeah, we'll introduce Darren in a sec.
1:33.4	But Barbara, really quick, can you just reintroduce yourself to our audience?
1:38.7	Sure.
1:39.5	I came on your channel, John, for episode 1838, coincidentally, to talk about our work on our
1:48.3	recently published, Vengeance is Mine, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and its aftermath.
1:53.0	That was a great pleasure to be able to share that history with you at that time.
1:56.8	And we're back again because I was getting so many questions and media interview requests and so forth to say,
2:04.3	okay, hey, what about this series is actual history and what is dramatization?
	...

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