This article on Deseret News provides an excellent fiction vs. reality comparison and it doesn't sugar coat the horror of MM.
https://www.deseret.com/faith/2025/01/2 ... heres-why/
One example:
Fiction: Paiute men participated in the massacre so they could take captive and rape several white women who were spared the slaughter. One man, a Latter-day Saint who happens to be traveling with the wagon train, is nearly scalped but survives. Shoshone men soon encounter these Paiutes, murder them, then slit the throats of all the captive women except for one: another Salt Lake City-bound Mormon who happened to be traveling with the emigrants. The Shoshone then kidnap that woman, leading Mormons to wipe out an entire band of Shoshone people as punishment for the kidnapping.
Fact: In reality, no one over the age of 6 survived the Mountain Meadows Massacre. No Latter-day Saints were traveling with the wagon train when the massacre occurred, nor is there any evidence of scalping. The Southern Paiute and Shoshone did not kidnap, rape and murder white women, nor would they have interacted with each other, as their homelands were hundreds of miles apart. Latter-day Saints settlers did not massacre Shoshone, though some did kill Ute and Paiute Indians in other 19th-century conflicts further south.
The show's director, Peter Berg, has defended this depiction by pointing to real accounts of Indigenous tribes abducting women.
I did some digging and found a true story of a young woman whose family had broken from the Brighimite faction of the church and she was kidnapped by members of a Yavapai tribe in current day Arizona and forced into servitude for a year and then traded to the Mojave, which adopted her as a member of the tribe.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/814 ... rked-woman
In summary, it seems that much of the elements of American Primeval are true in that stuff like that actually did happen in the American West but the depiction in the series jumbles up the timelines, geography, and who actually did what (for example, defending depictions of Southern Paiute and Shoshone kidnapping white women because members of other native tribes did this - as though they're not actually separate and distinct tribes) for dramatic and narrative purposes.
"It is not so much the pain and suffering of life which crushes the individual as it is its meaninglessness and hopelessness." C. A. Elwood
“It is not the function of religion to answer all the questions about God’s moral government of the universe, but to give one courage, through faith, to go on in the face of questions he never finds the answer to in his present status.” TPC: Harold B. Lee 223
"I struggle now with establishing my faith that God may always be there, but may not always need to intervene" Heber13