Item Detail
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10510
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21
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15
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English
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Perpetuation of a Myth : Mormon Danites in Five Western Novels, 1840-1890
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BYU Studies
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Spring 1983
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23
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147-65
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"Incidents of violence on the Utah Frontier were rare considering the expanse of the Mormon settlement and almost immediate interruption of its isolation. Surrounding the most tragic and widely reported incident, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, was an inflammatory circumstance: Utah was in a state of war, preparing for invasion by a federal army. Unfortunately, the details of the massacre and the harassment of Johnstone's Army by the Utah Nauvoo Legion and Minute Men (originally formed to protect settlers from Indian attacks) were usually distorted in the national press. Fiction writers were quick to use these incidents, along with tales of the short-lived Danite band. Between 1850 and 1900 these writers created a fictitious horde of "Danites" in dozens of short stories and more eighty novels, travel books, and pseudomemoirs published in America and Europe. By 1900 at least fifty-six anti-Mormon novels alone had been published in English, incorporating one or more aspects of the Danite myth, beginning with the false assumption that there was a functioning Danite organization in Utah.
". . . In this paper we trace the Danite theme in five of the more palatable and popular novels published between 1840 and 1890." [Author] -
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