In 1857, amidst the zeal of the Mormon Reformation and the Utah War with the federal government, a group of Mormon men lead a series of attacks on a sheltering wagon company from Arkansas. It resulted in the murder of at least 120 men, women, and children. Seventeen young children from the Baker-Francher party were allowed to live because they were deemed too young to tell. Eventually in 1877, John D. Lee was convicted and sentenced to death for his role leading the killings now known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

For generations this event was swept under the rug, hidden from the common knowledge of Latter-day Saints. Even today after church sanctioned books on the massacre and a popular Hulu series including it, many members know little about the true story of this mass killing and what role Mormonism played in it.

But author Noelle W. Ihli’s new historical fiction book None Left To Tell is breaking the history wide open for popular audiences, and she doesn’t shy away from telling the story with fresh honesty and a female-focused narrative.

None Left To Tell follows the stories of women before, during, and after the massacre. Noelle’s strong female characters include Lucy, a dedicated Mormon woman and the author’s ancestor, Katrina, a woman leading her family west with the doomed Baker-Francher party, and Sally, Brigham Young’s Native American servant “gifted” to another tribe’s loyal chief as his fourth wife. From their viewpoints, the reader is immersed in 1857 Utah, including in Mountain Meadows itself as the brutal siege and massacre take place.

Noelle did a “deep dive” into church history shortly after she left the church ten years ago and discovered the unknown-to-her story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. “As I was researching, I found out that my family members that were involved in this history. A lot of us who are pioneer stock that came to Utah were either aware or involved to some degree to this story that was the kept very quiet for clear reasons,” she says of her motivation to write this book.

It’s noteworthy to think about how our family history obsession in Mormonism ties into brutal events like Mountain Meadows. Very few traditional family histories pass down the negative acts of our pioneer ancestors who are portrayed as faithful, humble Saints that only wanted to live their religion in peace. I admire how Noelle was willing to connect her own family to this tragedy and be a voice for her great-great-great-grandmother even if it wasn’t entirely glowing. More honest church history, in my opinion, starts with honest family history. We need to let our ancestors be messy people, terrible people even. Their good or bad deeds do not make the church more or less “true.”

Despite feelings of anger while researching and a desire to view it in black-and-white, “here’s the good guys and these are the bad guys,” Noelle also wanted to portray her female narrators accurately. She says, “I needed to find that empathy and be able to write [Lucy’s] perspective in a way that would feel true to someone who was a lay member of the church at that time.”

Being willing to sit in gray areas, in nuance, is not a comfortable place especially in Mormonism. It’s easy to follow the church’s proscribed binary thinking when it comes to pioneers, past events, or even current ones. None Left To Tell is willing to sit in those hard spaces and allow the characters to be products of their time, circumstances, and life choices without forcing a faithful narrative over the top. Noelle also reminded me that even if a woman wasn’t a overt feminist in the modern sense, their “moments of sometimes defiance, sometimes just thoughtfulness in the face of a difficult topic” are important and inspiring.

With the hindsight of over a century, we want to ask how they did what they did. Noelle captures so well in her book the terror of the siege and massacre. It seemed unfathomable to me that humans could do such a thing, especially our beloved pioneer ancestors that “sang as they walked and walked and walked.”

These were lay members of the church, not a trained militia or bloodthirsty killers. “A lot of them didn’t realize what they were going out to do,” Noelle tells me. “When they got there it was a reminder of the oaths that they made to obedience and to avenge the blood of the prophets. It’s hard to separate the idea of obedience for someone who feels their ultimate obedience is to God and that the next chain down and the next chain down are speaking for God. That’s a very powerful thing to say ‘I’m not gonna do what you’re asking me to do’ when that chain is so direct coming down from God, even when that thing you’re being asked to do is pretty horrendous.”

We see this theme of obedience to church leaders when asked to do difficult things everywhere. As shown in the church’s recent polygamy cartoon debacle, Mormonism is big on grooming members to overcome their personal beliefs or wants to do what prophets tell you God wants you to do. I grew up on a steady diet of pioneer stories about doing hard things for the Lord even when they didn’t want to. Given all that training through retellings of Abraham and Isaac, Joseph and polygamy, the handcart companies, and so many others, it’s not entirely surprising that members could do something terrible when they believed they must obey their leaders.

Even brutally massacre 120 unarmed men, women, and children.

None Left To Tell doesn’t make excuses for the actions of these men or push the blame, but it does put a human face to this question of agency versus obedience. We see the women in the story struggling with the reality of the men’s choices and having to make their own about what to do with what they know.

Agency and obedience butt up against each other a lot in Mormonism. “There’s this theme of personal agency,” Noelle says about exploring obedience in the church, “and in the aftermath when something happens and someone makes a mistake or chooses the wrong but they were trying to be obedient, then we’re very quick to fall on agency and say ‘well they made that choice.'”

To be clear, just following orders does not absolve people of their own compliance. But we also have to recognize this negative pattern in Mormonism. I’ve heard this kind of gaslighting countless times. We’re quick to throw other members’ experiences out when rules change or when we realize that someone’s obedience didn’t lead to the magical promised blessings. We blame their agency rather than the forced path that took them down that road.

Similarly, Noelle felt it was important to include polygamy in her book. Not only was it historically a crucial theme of life in Utah at that time, “it was this test of obedience and test of faith tied up with a lot of pain and a lot of questions that you either leaned into or created divisions with,” she says. She wanted her characters to grapple with that and relates it to her own struggle when she was a members with these questions.

But women back in Lucy’s day didn’t have the internet or Exponent II to find answers or seek solace as a community. Most of the women who lived with the questions around polygamy were largely alone. “You’re being asked this ultimate thing, can you do it? Are you not going to do it? And if so, why not? Is it because you’re not faithful enough? Is it because you don’t believe enough?” Noelle says, trying to place herself in Lucy’s shoes.

Maybe we aren’t so far removed from pioneer women like Lucy. We still struggle with this messy knot of obedience and proving our faithfulness as we think about polygamy and the many unanswered questions about its reality in our own modern or eternal lives.

How do we hold all these things? How do we look back with honesty at a massacre by our ancestors’ hands? How do we make room for the humanity and messiness of historical figures? To me, this is the power of historical fiction. It not only places us in a time period completely foreign to us, it also makes it come alive. We see historical figures not as flat names on a textbook page, but as fleshed out humans with wants, fears, struggles, and secrets. When those people and places become real to us we truly learn from the past. Historical fiction teaches us not only lessons, but empathy. It shows us the best and worst of us as humans and provides a safe space to work through those contradictions.

None Left To Tell is a stunning book. I highly recommend it! It will suck you in and show you a history many want to forget or ignore. It will raise questions about your own relationship with faith and obedience. It will teach you why it’s critical that we are honest about our history and the actions of even our beloved pioneers.

You can get your own copy of None Left To Tell here. You can follow Noelle on social media here. When you read it, please leave a review too! We love to support our fellow feminist writers!

Have you ever heard of the Mountain Meadows Massacre before? Did you hear about it growing up? Have you read None Left To Tell or is it on your TBR now? Let us know what you think!