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Another example of the shifting shape of folklore lies closer to home. Most of us will remember the turbulent period in late 1969 and early 1970 when BYU athletic teams and the marching Cougarettes met violent demonstrations in neighboring schools, when a spate of stories was circulating about bus loads of Black Panthers making their way to the state to blow up Mountain Dell Reservoir and to invade Temple Square, and when some people feared to travel beyond the state's boundaries because they had heard gory stories of people with Utah license plates being stopped and beaten up by blacks. Emotions were intensified by the revival and rapid circulation of the apocryphal Horse Shoe Prophecy attributed to John Taylor. (This prophecy was first written down in 1951 by Edward Lunt, who said that in 1903 or 1904 he had learned it from his mother, who said that she had received it from President Taylor in 1885.) In Lunt's account, President Taylor supposedly saw a day of great trouble and warfare striking the Saints, with "blood running down the gutters of Salt Lake City as though it were water." As versions of the Prophecy began to multiply during the violence of 1969 and 1970, a new motif was added to it--the notion that the blood would run in the gutters because of racial warfare. For example, an employee of Seminaries and Institutes stated that it was common knowledge among teachers in the Church educational system that a confrontation with Black Panthers was going to take place in the streets of Salt Lake City and that this would be a fulfillment of the prophecy that Blacks would wreak havoc in the streets of Zion. He said that this prophecy was given to President Taylor. It was common knowledge from reliable sources [he said] that Blacks and hippies were arming themselves in the canyons east of the city and that the FBI had uncovered plans by revolutionaries to hit Salt Lake City with a violence campaign.
Another individual, a stockbroker who claimed he did not believe the part about Negroes, stated: John Taylor is supposed to have said that the Negroes will march to the west and that they will tear down the gates to the temple, ravage the women therein, and destroy and desecrate the temple. Then the Mormon boys will pick up their deer rifles and destroy the Negroes, and that's when the blood will run down the street.
On 30 March 1970, the First Presidency, concerned by the growing emotionalism, released a statement in which they denounced the Horse Shoe Prophecy and urged members to school their feelings. In their statement, the First Presidency quoted a memorandum from the Church Historian's office which pointed out that of the five copies of the prophecy on file in that office no two were identical in wording and that the statement about Negroes was in one of the copies but not in the others, "particularly" not in the version signed by Lunt. What the First Presidency actually did was conduct a small-scale folklore study. They discovered, as we have discovered with the James Rencher stories, that as stories are passed from person to person they are "adjusted" to reflect the concerns and to fit the predispositions of the people.
Source: Wilson, William A., BYU Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 44.
Folklore concerning blacks and Mormonism is a subject in and of itself.