September Dawn

“September Dawn” is a fictional Romeo and Juliet relationship love story set against the background of the controversial real-life massacre of 120 men, women and children traveling through Utah in the nineteenth century. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it is known, occurred on September 11, 1857, and was the first known act of religious terrorism on U.S. soil. A group of Mormons, many disguised as Paiute Indians, slaughtered all but 17 small children on a wagon train on its way to California. One man, the adopted son of Mormon leader Brigham Young, was eventually executed for the crime — 20 years after the event. The film is deemed controversial because it presents a point of view held strongly by hundreds of direct descendants of the massacre: that the iconic Brigham Young had complicity in the massacre, a view denied by the Mormon Church, even today.