Kyle Harrison
person

Juanita Brooks

Juanita Brooks

In Leonard Arrington and the Writing of Mormon History, Brooks functions as the standard of fiercely independent Mormon historiography against which Arrington’s career is measured. Her work enters Arrington’s intellectual formation early — alongside Lowry Nelson’s The Mormon Village and Bernard DeVoto, he read “an article by Juanita Brooks in Harper’s” while building out his reading in Mormon history, economics, and sociology. Her 1950 The Mountain Meadows Massacre is grouped with the landmark independent works of the era (Wallace Stegner, DeVoto, Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, Dale Morgan), and decades later Arrington drew an explicit analogy between the relief of finally getting honest history into print and “the relief felt when Mountain Meadows Massacre was published by Juanita Brooks.”

She is also used in the book as a pointed contrast to the institutional church historian’s office. At a 1973 banquet, Belva Ashton told Arrington that church employees should not even attempt to write biographies and histories — that she “greatly preferred to rely on Juanita Brooks, a fiercely independent writer with acknowledged probity,” and would read Juanita’s publications “instead of the church historian’s accounts” to get a straightforward account. Elbert Peck later framed Brooks as the lonely forerunner: a decade before Arrington, “you had few people just writing and bonding together, Juanita Brooks and her friends,” corresponding with Dale Morgan about “their lonely plight as historians” — the isolation Arrington’s tenure helped end.

Context: Juanita Brooks (1898–1989) was a Utah historian best known for The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950), one of the first rigorous accounts of the 1857 killing of an emigrant wagon train by Mormon militia, written despite institutional pressure.

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