Mary Oldfield, daughter of George Oldfield and Temperance Shepherd, was born in 1791 in Minisink, New York. She married Eli Kelsey (1785-1836) in 1805 in Onatario, New York. They had six children. She married John Pierce (1780-1844) in 1843 in Nauvoo, Illinois. She married John Gribble (b.1788) in 1846. She married Brigham Young in 1852 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Jane Caldwell, daughter of Joseph Caldwell and Mary Bennett, was born in 1808 or 1809 in Mercer County, Pennsylvania or Steubenville, Ohio. She married John Waite in about 1830. They had seven children. She married Eli Brazee Kelsey. She died in 1891 in Bountiful, Utah.

When she began writing, Mary Haskin Parker Richards was twenty-two, a Mormon convert who had traveled from England to the American frontier separately from her parents, and a newlywed just parted from her husband, sent to Britain as a missionary. She lived with her in-laws, an extended family led by Willard Richards, also a leader of the Mormon church. Reorganized in the aftermath of the assassination of Joseph Smith, the church was making its way west under the guidance of Brigham Young, a Richards cousin.

In the Fall of 1857, some 120 California-bound emigrants were killed in lonely Mountain Meadows in southern Utah; only eighteen young children were spared. The men on the ground after the bloody deed took an oath that they would never mention the event again, either in public or in private. The leaders of the Mormon church also counseled silence. The first report, soon after the massacre, described it as an Indian onslaught at which a few white men were present, only one of whom, John D. Lee, was actually named. With admirable scholarship, Mrs. Brooks has traced the background of conflict, analyzed the emotional climate at the time, pointed up the social and military organization in Utah, and revealed the forces which culminated in the great tragedy at Mountain Meadows. The result is a near-classic treatment which neither smears nor clears the participants as individuals. It portrays an atmosphere of war hysteria, whipped up by recitals of past persecutions and the vision of an approaching "army" coming to drive the Mormons from their homes.