Part 1 of 4

<There have been some who have asked just what problems I find with
 Randy Jordan's reporting accuracy, credibility, etc. I am not going to
 engage in a debate on this matter,

That's a wise decision, considering what happened the last time you attempted
to.

read this article make up their own minds, although I think that most minds are
already made up.

Translation:  "I'll post my material and run away, because I don't want to deal
with Randy's rebuttal."

Compared to yours, that's an accurate assessment, which I believe that the vast
majority of readers would agree with.

I am quite conversant on both sides of the issues, as is obvious from the
material I presented to you months ago.  You seem to forget that I was a Mormon
for the first 42 years of my life, and that I heard the Mormon "side of the
issues" constantly during that time.  

 anything LDS and ascertain if he presents an impartial point of view.

I'm not here to set out to "present an impartial point of view."  Most ARM
readers are familiar with the Mormon "point of view," and I find it unnecessary
to rehash what readers here have been taught all their lives.  My agenda is to
inform interested readers of the "side of the issues" that the LDS Church fails
to disclose.

I present material from documented historical sources, and draw logical
conclusions from them.  The conclusion drawn from pro-Mormon sources are
illogical, unforthcoming, and are clearly designed for purposes of propaganda,
rather than education.

Randy's contention that Brigham Young had foreknowledge of the Mountain Meadows
Massacre, and actually was the planner of the deed.

That's correct, as made obvious by the numerous items of information I
presented.  The MMM was merely one criminal act among many that Mormons engaged
in, upon the orders and policies of their leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham
Young, from 1838 to 1877.

This is what Bigler had to say on the subject:

 most trusted interpreter, 49-year-old Dimick B. Huntington, at GreatSalt Lake.
 Taking part in this pow-wow were Kanosh, the Mormon chief of the Pahvants;
Ammon, half-brother of Walker; Tutsegabit, head chief of the Piedes; Youngwuds,
another Piede chieftain, and other leaders of desert bands along the Santa
Clara and Virgin rivers.  Little was known of what they talked about until
recently when it came to light that Huntington (apparently speaking for Young)
told the chiefs that he "gave them all
 the cattle that had god to Cal[ifornia by] the south rout[e]." The gift "made
them open their eyes," he said.  But "you have told us not to steal,"  the
Indians replied. "So I have," Huntington said, "but now they have come to fight
us & you for when they kill us they will kill you."  The chiefs knew what
cattle he was giving them. They belonged to the Baker-Fancher train."  (Bigler,
 Forgotten Kingdom, 168)

the excerpt.

 brother) & 11 Pahvants CAME IN TO SEE B & D & FIND OUT ABOUT THE
 SOLDIERS. Tutseygubbit, a Piede Chief over 6 Piedes bands, Youngwuols
 [?] another Piede & I gave them all the cattle that had gone to Cal. the
 south rout It made them open their eyes.  They sayed that you have told
 us not to steal.  So I have, but now they have come to fight us & you,
 for when they kill us then they will kill you.  They sayed the[y] was
 afraid to fight the Americans & so would raise grain and we might fight.

were on their way to Utah at the time. But that part of the excerpt is left out
of Bigler's book.

As I made it perfectly clear via numerous documented sources, your idea that
this meeting in question was concerning the soldiers of Johnson's army is
invalid, because the particular Indians in attendance at that meeting lived in
Southern Utah, right on the trail that the Fancher party took, and some 300
miles southeast of where Johnson's Army was at the time.  Johnson's Army had no
intention of going any further west or south than Salt Lake City, and was no
threat to southern Indians in the least.

The thing that you cannot get through your thick skull is that Brigham Young
deceived the naive, trusting Indians into believing that the Fancher party were
ALSO soldiers, and thus the "enemies" of both the Mormons and the Indians.  It
was only Young's casting of the Fancher party as a threat that incited the
Indians to attack them.

The idea that Indian chiefs from Southern Utah, 200 miles south of SLC, would
be concerned about what Johnson's Army, 300 miles to the northeast was doing,
is preposterous.   The meeting with Young, (Indian agent) Hamblin, Huntington,
etc., served to incite the Indians to attack the Fancher party, and that is
exactly what they did.

clearer, contempoaneous picture of what was the primary concern at the time.

You already quoted the excerpts from Huntingdon's diary months ago.  I wrote a
two-part response to it.  I will re-post them under the title "Dimick
Huntington and the MMM."  Hopefully, you won't ignore them this time.

For another source that sheds more light on the situation, Juanita Brooks
wrote:

"Jacob Hamblin, faced with his new responsibility for the Indians and concerned
about making them understand their part in the approaching war, decided to take
a group of the chiefs to Great Salt Lake City for an interview with the great
Mormon chief, Brigham Young.  His handwritten diary, as yet unpublished, says:

'I started for Great Salt Lake City in company with Thales Haskell and
Tutsegabit [the Yannawant chief.]  He had felt anxiousfor a long time to visit
Brigham Young.  We fell in company with George A. Smith.  Conosh [the Puavant
chief] joined us.  Other Indian chiefs also joined our company.  When we
arrived in the City there were ten of them went up to see Brigham Young, the
Great Mormon chief.  We encamped on Corn Creek on our way up; near a company of
Emigrants from Arkansas, on the-----'

"Here the account stops abruptly, for the next leaf is torn out."  ("Mountain
Meadows Massacre," Juanita Brooks, pp. 40-41.)

Now, the inquisitive reader would naturally ask, "Why was the next page in
Hamblin's diary torn out?"  Considering the fact that the prior entry mentioned
the "company of Emigrants from Arkansas," it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to
answer that question.  Undoubtedly, either Hamblin, or some later Mormon,
ripped out whatever followed that entry, most likely to destroy the "paper
trail" of Hamblin's activities and Mormon involvement in the MMM following the
meeting with the Indians.

As Brooks continues:  "The previous Mormon policy had been to keep the natives
from stealing and plundering and to teach them the peaceful pursuits of farming
and cattle raising, but now Brigham Young seemed determined that he would no
longer 'hold them by the wrist,' as he told Captain van Vliet a few days later.
 The Indians must have started back immediately, for in seven days they were
harassing the emigrants at Mountain Meadows, and in ten days they participated
in the massacre of the company."
(ibid., pp. 41-42.)

If we believed Glenn Thigpen's line of apologetics, the southern Indians, after
meeting with Young, should have prepared to travel 300 miles northeast to
Wyoming and aid the Mormons in engaging Johnson's Army.  But to the contrary,
those Indians went right back to their land in southern Utah, and attacked the
Fancher party.  That again makes it obvious that the "cattle that had gone to
California by the south route", which Dimick Huntington wrote of, was the
cattle that belonged to the Fancher train, or perhaps of the Duke party which
followed.

Glenn, this is your first response to this issue in several months.  You might
one day realize that it would have been better for you to just remain silent.

Randy J.