The Ballad of Juanita Brooks

An intimate biography of Utah's foremost historianFor nearly a century, the Mountain Meadows Massacre was one of the American West's most carefully managed silences. Then Juanita Brooks told the truth. Born into the founding families of Mormonism, Brooks was a devout believer, mother, schoolteacher, folklorist, and historian. From her kitchen table in southern Utah's red rock desert, she pursued the truth about the 1857 massacre, tracking down confessions, diaries, and church records that powerful men hoped would remain buried. When her findings implicated Mormon leadership, she published them anyway, knowing it would cost her friendships, status, and peace. This new biography is a generous but critical portrait of a truth-teller who believed accountability was a form of devotion. Here we see Brooks writing from her lived experience, weaving her intellectual rigor with the intimate realities of belief, motherhood, bodily autonomy, and purity culture. Her story, urgently relevant, belongs not only to the academy but to the shared cultural imagination.