The film September Dawn purports to tell the story of the Mountain Meadows massacre of September 11, 1857, in which Mormon militiamen slaughtered over 120 people on a California-bound wagon train.

The film September Dawn purports to tell the story of the Mountain Meadows massacre of September 11, 1857, in which Mormon militiamen slaughtered over 120 people on a California-bound wagon train. It pins the blame on Brigham Young, Mormonism's prophet at the time: a contested point, to put it mildly. Hollywood doesn't often visit second-order events in American history (the Whiskey Rebellion? the Haymarket bombing?) unless it has an ax to grind. The ax of September Dawn is being sharpened for modern Mormonism. All religions make truth claims, and most of us accept at most only one set. But religions also make their own records in the world. Mormons haven't massacred anybody in a long time (nor have Mormons been lynched, the fate of founder Joseph Smith). At a time when we are actually fighting religious-based terrorists, Hollywood chooses to rake up the remote past of law-abiding Americans.