If they've opened up now, that's great. The Church archives are also becoming much more open, which I welcome. The current Joseph Smith papers project is a marvelous instance of that:
http://josephsmithpapers.org/Default.htm
So is Massacre at Mountain Meadows itself. And, as the Church's website notes of Massacre at Mountain Meadows co-author Richard Turley:
Under his editorship in 2002, the Family and Church History Department published Selected Collections From the Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), a collection of 74 DVDs containing nearly 500,000 color images of many of the Church’s most important early documents, including the Joseph Smith Collection and Brigham Young’s letterbooks. Critics have hailed Selected Collections as “the most important event in modern Mormon publishing,” “an achievement of such significance that no praise, no matter how effusive, seems sufficiently laudatory.”
But you haven't really touched my fundamental point. Beastie and Master Scartch and perhaps a few others have claimed that, since not everybody (or since not every scholar) is clearly able to inspect every document and source cited in Massacre at Mountain Meadows, the book remains under a cloud of suspicion. Master Scartch, in fact, seems to want to believe it utterly worthless. (There's no reason to believe that Scartch has ever seen it. In fact, there's no particular reason that I'm aware of to believe that Scartch has ever seen any work on LDS history not written by Mike Quinn -- and perhaps only one or two of those.) But nobody that I've ever encountered appears to feel that way about the many biographies that appear each year that are based upon privileged biographer access to the private papers of Gerald Ford or the letters of Winston Churchill or the unfinished manuscripts of John Cheever or the correspondence of Franklin Roosevelt's mistress or whatever. This is an extremely common phenomenon. Usually, at least in normal circles, unprecedented acccess is seen as a selling point, a mark of a book's value, rather than as evidence of a conspiracy and reason to dismiss the work.
