Stories of the violence in the mountains spread quickly by word of mouth and telegraph. Before the end of September 1894, Armenian radicals, British consuls, American missionaries, and Ottoman state officials were beginning to struggle over their interpretations of the violence. Over the course of the next few weeks, two competing narratives coalesced. The first narrative, based on accounts of survivors of the massacres and participating Ottoman troops, reported by ABCFM missionaries and British consuls, stressed how Ottoman troops had been directed to murder large numbers of Armenian villagers under the pretext of destroying a rebellion. The second narrative, composed by the powerful commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, stressed that the Ottomans restored the peace in a turbulent area at the mountainous edges of imperial control. Throughout this period, the Ottoman state labored to monopolize the legitimate narrative, certain reports were endlessly reproduced within the Ottoman bureaucracy, and those reports remain to this day the official interpretation of what took place in Sasun. At the same time, stories of violence appeared in the British and American presses, with calls for political reform and an impartial investigation of what had taken place.