Date: December 2, 2019 (Season 1, Episode 4 - Part 1: 31 min. & 18 sec. long). Click here for the Utah Dept. of Culture and Community Engagement version of this Speak Your Piece episode. Are you interested in other episodes of Speak Your Piece? Click Here. This episode was co-produced by Brad Westwood and Chelsey Zamir, with help (sound engineering and post-production editing) from Conner Sorenson (Studio Underground) and Jason Powers (Utah State Library Recording Studio).

This reissued SYP episode is an interview with Richard E. Turley Jr., former Assistant Church Historian of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, with SYP host Brad Westwood in 2019. Turley discusses his thirty-five-year long career in Mormon history including the creation of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. In this near decade quest, Turley and the Church History Department (hereafter CHD) tracked down every known and newly discovered historical source (books, manuscripts, letters, government documents, etc.) about the church founder, in every conceivable location, and then digitized them, ensuring instant digital availability to anyone around the world. During Turley’s tenure the church also created regional history centers across the globe, and digitized millions of records. To see the church's vast holdings on-line click on digital holdings.

Some of the items in the church’s collection today, which interest so many people, are about the church’s most well-known 19th century controversy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. After the publication of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows by Will Bagley in 2002, the CHD pursued a project to better understand and refute Bagley’s primary historical assumption: that Brigham Young knew full well about and sanctioned the massacre of over 120 immigrants traveling to California. Their discovery was that Young did not sanction the massacre but that they did obstruct justice for decades regarding all the perpetrators and allowing the church’s membership to believe that the horrendous act was largely the act of Native Americans. Turley’s and Barbara Jones Brown’s book Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath, to be released by Oxford Press in March 2023, aspires to answer this need.   

Turley concludes Part 1 of this episode with another story brought to the forefront of history. Turley and SYP host Brad Westwood sought to memorialize the Circleville Massacre, which occurred during the Black Hawk War (1865-1872), where approximately thirty Native Americans were killed by Mormon settlers. Turley, Westwood, and team found that many native peoples wanted this story to be better well-known by the public; and so, a monument (from the perspective of the victims) was erected to memorialize the massacre victims, an event nearly erased from the public memory.

Bio: Richard E. Turley, former Assistant Church Historian (and before this, Executive Director) of the Church History Department. Among other works, Turley co-authored in 2008 Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy with Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard, and in 1992 Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case. 

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