Yes, I remember seeing or reading something about this. This is a touchy subject in Utah, as much of the Mormon church tries to ignore this story, much like Japs ignore Pearl Harbor. I think that a band of militant Mormoms masscred these pioneers as they crossed southern Utah and dressed like Indians.
The attack was carried out by Paiute Indians and Mormon militia. After the Arkansans surrendered, they were taken by the Mormons., who then killed every man, woman and child above eight years of age [there were survivors, recovered from Mormon families]. The controversy is not that the LDS was involved. Stephen D. Lee was convicted of the crime. The controversy is whether Brigham Young ordered the massacre. There are several excellent books on the subject, as well as monographs, written on ther subject.
This is a touchy subject in Utah
It's also a touchy subject in Arkansas and among descendants of some of those that were murdered.
I have a cousin-in-law who had hit a few brickwalls in his genealogy research - he had some ancestors that kind of dropped off the face of the earth,and one of his ancestors would have been a small child when it happened - he only had two letters from the 1860s to go on, plus some scattered records (marriage and birth - and I'm not talking full-blown birth certificate, I'm talking a few lines in a country doctor's journal), plus some census information, and a will.
All of the information was there for him to figure it out, but he knew nothing about the Massacre (this was before genealogy on the internet really got going). It took him quite a while to put together what he had, and we made a trip up to Arkansas, and a kind old lady in a library there overheard us talking to a librarian about records of that time. What caught her ear, was him telling the librarian that it was almost like they had both just up and left, and were never heard from again, or had been murdered somewhere, and he never could explain how their child came to be raised by their aunt and uncle. She caught our attention and started drilling him for details - she turned out to be a very distant cousin of his, and had a lot of the information he needed (including living relatives that were descended from the same line as he).
He, to this day, has no desire to ever go near Utah, and doesn't care for Mormons - very irrational, but I guess he had spent so much time trying to find out what happened, that it became personal. I think he should have went to the site in 1999 or whatever, with other descendants, but he just wouldn't go.
The ironic thing is, nowadays we can plug in a few names and pull up the
Mountain Meadows Massacre Association's Genealogy site and a few minutes later have a lot more information that connects the dots, so to speak. I don't recommend that for anybody that hasn't already researched as much as possible - way too many people these days pull anything and everything out of genealogy sites, but if you already have a solid foundation, sites like that can nudge things along.