She told the truth about her own people — and changed how the West remembers itself.
Born in 1898 in the desert town of Bunkerville, Nevada, Juanita Brooks grew up inside a tight-knit Mormon frontier community, where a woman's road was expected to be settled early. Widowhood, a young son to raise, and a stubborn hunger to know things as they really were set her on a different path.
At mid-life she became one of the American West's most consequential historians. With the 1950 publication of The Mountain Meadows Massacre, she did the unthinkable: she documented a brutal 1857 atrocity carried out by her own community, refusing the comforting story that had stood in its place for nearly a century.
Church leaders pressed her to stop. She kept writing.
A faithful member of her church to the end, Brooks chose history over comfort and integrity over approval. The Ballad of Juanita Brooks is the seven-years-in-the-making account of that life — wife, mother, teacher, and undaunted historian — told as a ballad for the West that made her.
