Juanita Leavitt Pulsipher Brooks was born in Bunkerville, Nevada in 1898. She is the granddaughter of Dudley Leavitt; one of the first pioneers of Utah's "Dixie," and is related by blood or marriage to many of the families who settled that region. Her early interest in the history of her family and the region in which they lived developed and expanded to become her life's work, and today she is considered the foremost authority on the history of southern Utah.

Although Mrs. Brooks has made her reputation as a historian, most of her formal education was in the field of English language and literature. After graduating from Virgin Valley High School in Bunkerville in 1916, she attended Dixie Junior College in St. George, Utah, then Brigham Young University, from which she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 1925. She returned to Dixie to teach English and serve as Dean of Women from 1925-1933, but took the school year of 1928-1929 to complete her Master's degree at Columbia University.

Her first marriage lasted only a year, ending in 1920 when her husband, Ernest Pulsipher, died of throat cancer. She had a son from that marriage, and completed her entire college and graduate work in spite of her encumbrances as a widowed mother. The experience forced upon her a high degree of discipline, a discipline that made possible her later career as a historian, for she wrote most of her later outpouring of books, articles, and edited documents while caring for a large family. Rising well before daylight, she wrote for several hours before preparing breakfast for her family, and then crowded in whatever writing time she could during busy days as a housekeeper and active churchwoman.

Her domestic responsibilities increased in 1933 when she quit teaching at Dixie to marry the local sheriff, William Brooks. In addition to her son, Brooks had four sons from a previous marriage, and together they had four more children.

Juanita Brooks's career as a historian developed during the years 1933-1950, a period that began with her project of collecting and transcribing manuscript diaries and other sources in southern Utah and culminated with the publication by Stanford University Press of her classic study of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The manuscript collecting project grew out of her earlier interest in the history of her region, but began in earnest when sociologist Nels Anderson, who lived across the street from the Brooks family in St. George, suggested that Federal funds from New Deal relief programs might be available. Mrs. Brooks secured funds first from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and later from the Works Progress Administration's Historical Records Survey to pay for several typists who worked in an office in her spare bedroom. Will Brooks' position as the man who knew everyone in Washington County opened many doors for his wife on her manuscript collecting forays. Before long the quantity and quality of the work done on her project began to attract wider attention. One of the most fruitful results of the reputation Mrs. Brooks acquired during the project was a deep and long lasting friendship with Dale L. Morgan, who was at the time director of the WPA Federal Writers' Project and beginning to attract national attention as a first-rate historian with a consuming zeal for accuracy, an appetite for hard work, and a graceful literary style -- all qualities that came to characterize Mrs. Brooks' work as well.

During the 1930s an almost constant stream of writing began to flow from Mrs. Brooks' typewriter, practically all of which demonstrated an unparalleled depth of acquaintance with the sources for southern Utah history and an equally unparalleled objectivity and maturity of interpretation. But it was the appearance in 1950 of The Mountain Meadows Massacre that established her beyond question as a historian of the first rank. Her interest in that dark episode of Utah history dated from her girlhood acquaintance with Nephi Johnson, one of the central participants, and a terrifying scene at the side of his deathbed, where he deliriously recalled that day. During the intervening years, she quietly began to collect notes and sources relating to the massacre, and her book, particularly in its revised version (1962) remains the definitive account.

The thesis of the book, which blames the heightened passions of the Mormon Reformation, the Utah War and the over-reaction of the stake leadership at Cedar City for the massacre rather than Brigham Young (as skeptical Gentiles had always suspected) or John D. Lee (whom the Mormon church allowed to suffer alone as a scapegoat to avoid further investigation), would seem to have been a moderate, reasonable statement. For southern Utah Mormons, though, who had avoided all discussion of the event for almost a century, the book pricked sensitive folk and family memories, and Mrs. Brooks, even though she was a loyal and active Mormon before and since, suffered considerable ostracism in her community.

A great deal of her research for The Mountain Meadows Massacre took place during a long association with the Henry E. Huntington Library as a manuscript collector and later as a researcher. Her acquaintance with the John D. Lee sources at that institution and with the Lee family led her to follow her Meadows Massacre book with a biography of John Doyle Lee: Zealot--Pioneer Builder--Scapegoat (1961). She has also edited for publication the diaries of Lee, Thomas D. Brown, Hosea Stout, and other important pioneers of southern Utah.

During the 1950s Mrs. Brooks returned to teaching at Dixie College in addition to devoting a large part of her time to the numerous requests to speak at academic functions and meetings of historical societies. During the 1960s she held a staff position at the Utah State Historical Society while she edited the Hosea Stout diary. Recent publications were manuscripts written many years ago and published with the editorial assistance of others, such as her biography of Jacob Hamblin and her autobiography, Quicksand and Cactus. Brooks passed away in 1989.