Red Water

"On September 11, 1857, a group of 120 emigrants en route to California was attacked and slaughtered by Mormon settlers and their Indian allies. The lives of seventeen children under the age of seven were spared. Twenty years later, John D. Lee, a Mormon and a participant in the massacre, was executed by a firing squad at the same spot and thus entered history as the scapegoat for all those responsible for what came to be known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.".

"Red Water is the story of the life of John D. Lee as told by three of his nineteen wives: Emma, a young English convert to the faith whom he met shortly after the event; Ann, the last thirteen year old he married; and Rachel, the sister of one of his first wives, who became his most devoted wife. As each of these women speaks, a portrait of a complex and ambitious, generous and tortured man emerges.

Each of Lee's wives possessed an independent spirit and yet each was mesmerized by him - a member of Brigham Young's inner circle, a resourceful frontiersman, a proselytizer, a man of appetite and charisma. Judith Freeman gives us an immediate, dramatic, and insightful depiction of early Mormon belief; the sense of persecution felt by the Mormons; the steadfast adherence of sisters in marriage; and the devastation felt by Lee's family at his death."--BOOK JACKET.