In the summer of 1875 a lengthy trial ensued, and as there were Mormons among the jurors, they failed to agree in a verdict.
Public indignation grew intensely against the system of falsehood constantly practised by the Mormon jurors, when the Church or any of its leaders were interested in the courts, and a second trial of John D. Lee was earnestly demanded.
During his first trial the Apostle George A. Smith, Brigham’s favourite and counsellor, who was undoubtedly the instrument through whom Lee and his associates had been “counselled” to destroy the emigrants, was still living, and to screen him it was necessary that Lee should escape the penalty of his crime.
Between the first and second trials of John D. Lee, Smith died, and Lee might now confess what he pleased, for the link in the chain of communication from Brigham Young to the murderers was for ever broken.
Continually striving to gain the admission of Utah into the Union as a State, and being always met with a repulse based upon the wholesale murder crimes in Utah that had gone unpunished, Brigham, having no longer anything to fear from Lee’s confessions of his (Brigham’s) complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, resolved to sacrifice Lee to appease the public clamour; accordingly the testimony from eye-witnesses was overwhelming, and Lee was condemned by his own Mormon brethren, who for nearly twenty years had carried in their minds this guilty evidence.
Lee was sentenced to be executed on the 23rd of March, 1877, and as he had the choice of the manner of his death, he elected to be shot. The court so approved, and ordered him to be, on the day named, taken to the Mountain Meadows, where the great slaughter of the innocent men, women, and children, had been consummated, to there meet his doom.
How truthfully I had told the story of this great crime will be seen in the confession of Lee before his execution; and what a dreadful commentary that document is on the Mormon Priesthood will be apparent to every intelligent reader.
Under the name of a Prophet of Jesus Christ, Brigham Young could rule with unchallenged sway hundreds of thousands of honest men and women, who were born of Christian parents, and trained in the civilized customs of Europe and America!
It would seem impossible, yet it is within this book revealed to be an astounding and humiliating fact.
In the escort conducting Lee to the place of execution there were in all about eighty persons, one of whom was a photographer, who deemed the circumstance worthy perpetuation by the unerring camera. From one of those present I copy the sketch of the ending of John D. Lee.