Pillar of Light

by Gerald N. Lund

  The brethren went home greatly discouraged. Appeal to the local judiciary and legal officers? How bitter the irony. The signatures on the “secret constitution” that demanded the removal of the Saints from Jackson County included, among others, those of Samuel Lucas, judge of Jackson County; Samuel Owens, county clerk; Russell Hicks, deputy county clerk; John Smith, justice of the peace; Samuel Weston, justice of the peace; William Brown, constable; and Thomas Pitcher, deputy constable. And all of these were secretly assisted by none other than the lieutenant governor of the state himself, Lilburn W. Boggs. In a word, the very men who had pledged their lives and their honor to the task of driving the Saints from the county were now to be petitioned for redress? When they tried to convince Dunklin of that, their accusations fell on deaf ears.

  Perhaps their journey to Jefferson City had been in vain, but with the return of the delegation an important corner was turned. The Saints had followed the admonitions of the Savior. They had turned the other cheek and submitted meekly to injustice. They had gone the second mile, and gone it again. “Now,” they said, “we cannot patiently bear these wrongs any longer; according to the laws of God and man, we have borne enough.” Members were counseled to arm themselves and protect their women and children, even with force if necessary. A group of brethren went north into Clay County and purchased powder and lead.

  On October twentieth, three months to the day after the destruction of the Evening and Morning Star, the Church leaders formally declared their intentions to defend themselves against any more physical violence. They would not be the aggressor in any case, but the Missourians were given fair warning. The Saints were no longer to be idle spectators to their own demise.

  With that declaration, the die was cast, fate was set and locked. The final confrontation between saint and settler in Jackson County was about to begin.

  It was October thirty-first, 1833. On the morrow it would be what some Christians called “All Saints’ Day.” In ancient Europe, on that day, a special mass, called “Allhallowmas,” was said. The night before the mass came to be called “All Hallows’ Eve,” or more commonly, “Halloween.” An ancient Celtic festival that was also held on October thirty-first came to have an influence on the Christian celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. While many of the Celtic customs were left behind by the religious immigrants who came to America, some survived. One of the most common was the pulling of pranks and the working of mischief on Halloween night. The Celtic peoples believed that the souls of the dead were allowed to return to their homes for only one evening a year—Halloween—and when forced to return to their graves, would vent their frustration by tipping over gravestones, soaping windows, pulling down outhouses, and so forth.

  Though Joshua Steed knew nothing of the origin of Halloween or why behavior that was normally forbidden was winked at on this night, as he reined his horse to a halt along the edge of the tree line he couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony. They were no longer boys, these forty or so men who rode with him and Colonel Pitcher, but they were about to do a little mischief of their own tonight.

  The night was still and clear, cold and already frosting. There was a quarter moon but the night was quite dark, and he heard men curse and swear as they bumped into one another or got slapped across the face with low-hanging tree branches.

  “Quiet!” Pitcher hissed. “You’ll have every Mormon in the settlement awake and waiting for us.”

  Gradually the men quieted down. Beneath him, Joshua’s horse was dancing a little, sensing the tension in the humans around him. Joshua leaned down and patted his neck. “Steady, boy.”

  “All right, Steed, where do we go?”

  Joshua had specifically chosen to ride with Pitcher, because although Pitcher was only deputy constable of Jackson County, Joshua found him to be much more decisive and prone to action than Constable Brown. And it was action that Joshua was looking for this night. He wasn’t interested in a night of hard riding and a lot of bluster.

  He prodded his horse forward a little, pointing. In the pale moonlight thin streams of smoke could be seen coming from several chimneys. Four or five dim lights glowed, outlining the windows of those cabins in which there were people still awake; but other than that, the cabins were not visible in the darker shadows of the trees that lined the Big Blue River.

  “This is called the Whitmer settlement,” Joshua said to Pitcher. “The cabins are mostly on the edge of the trees that line the river. The ferry is to the left, there where the trees are thinnest.”

  Pitcher half turned in his saddle. “All right, men,” he said, “you all know that the Mormons have been told to resist, to fight back.” He grinned, a look of pure enjoyment crossing his face. “That’s what they’ve been told. Do you think they’ve got the stomach to actually do it?”

  There were soft cries and a bark of raucous laughter.

  “Do you have the stomach for it?”

  “Yeah!” It came out as one cry.

  “Then, let’s go!” Pitcher lifted the reins and put the spurs to his horse.

  “Hee yaw!” Joshua yelled. He jerked forward, laying his face next to the horse’s mane, giving it its head. Behind him the men erupted. There were screams and yells, shouts, cursings, oaths, and a pistol shot or two as they thundered across the meadows and up to the little cluster of cabins. Pitcher pulled his horse up hard and Joshua nearly ran him down.

  “Fan out!” Pitcher yelled.

  Joshua leaped off his horse even before it came to a halt, and hit the ground running. “Get the menfolk!” he shouted. “Don’t let any of them escape.”

  Without waiting to see if he was obeyed, he pulled out his pistol, darted up to the door of one of the cabins, and threw his shoulder against it. It was made of wood slabs, loosely nailed and lashed together with strips of rawhide. It shattered inward, spewing wood everywhere. There was a woman’s terrified scream and sounds of frantic scrambling. By the light of a dying fire, he saw a woman in a white nightshirt and cap sitting up in bed, clutching the blankets around her. The whites of her eyes were like two small lamps against the surrounding darkness.

  “Mama! Mama!” A three- or four-year-old girl came stumbling out from behind a blanket used as a room divider. At the sight of Joshua, she screamed and burst into tears.

  In an instant the woman was out of the bed and clutching the child to her. Joshua looked around quickly. “Where’s your husband?” he demanded.

  “I...I don’t know. He ran.” But her eyes darted momentarily to where a large, hand-hewn log table sat in the corner. In two steps Joshua was there, the muzzle of the pistol pointing beneath it. “Out!” he barked.

  For a moment there was silence, then a scuffling sound. Joshua stepped back and let the man come out. When he stood, Joshua jerked him around so the firelight would catch his face. He nodded in satisfaction. “Why, Mr. Whitmer,” he said, “how good of you to join us.”

  They found eight men all told. The rest had scattered into the night, and no amount of threatening could make the frantic women tell where their husbands had gone. Now the men stood before the mob. Standing there in their nightshirts, barefooted and with their hair disheveled, they looked small and ridiculously vulnerable.

  Pitcher was gleeful as he marched back and forth in front of them. He turned to his men, who formed a half circle around their captives. “Do these look like the men who promised to fight for their women and children?”

  There was a roar of laughter and cries of derision.

  Joshua stepped forward. “Do you know who these men are?” he shouted.

  “They’re Mormons,” one man yelled back, “that’s good enough for me.”

  “They’re more than that,” Joshua said, turning to let his eyes sweep along the line. “Some of these men are Whitmers.”

  Now the men of the mob seemed a little puzzled. What did they care who they were?

  But Joshua cared. “The Whitmers are close friends of Joe Smith. The Whitmers helped Joe Smith with the Book
of Mormon.” He stepped to the last man in the line. “Take this man here, for example.” He reached out with his riding crop and lifted the man’s head. “This here is Hiram Page. He married a Whitmer girl. Mr. Page is one of them that claims he saw an angel, the same angel that Joe Smith said he saw.”

  “No,” Page said, “I saw the plates, but I never said I saw—”

  But he never got a chance to finish. Suddenly the Reverend Mr. Pixley, a man sent out west to Christianize the savages who inhabited Indian Territory, leaped forward. “Blasphemy!” he cried in horror. “Blasphemy!” He hurled himself at Hiram Page, slashing across Page’s cheek the short stick he carried.

  It was like a signal to the pack. The men swarmed over their captives, screaming, shouting, kicking, jabbing. Whips and clubs flashed in the pale moonlight. Joshua stepped back to stand beside Pitcher, a little shocked by the fury that he was witnessing.

  Pitcher leaned over slightly. “You were right about Pixley,” he said.

  Joshua nodded. The deputy constable had objected to having the good reverend ride with them, but Joshua had persuaded him otherwise. Not that Joshua had found religion. He had little more respect for these men than he did for the Mormons, but war made for strange bedfellows. Pixley and the Reverend Finis Ewing of the Cumberland Presbyterian church had been in the forefront of the opposition to the Mormons. Joshua knew that Pixley would not blanch when it came to violence, and sensed that he might be an important influence in prodding the men to action. Besides, Joshua had told Pitcher with a chuckle, the preachers lent a certain air of respectability to the whole affair.

  With their fury finally spent, the men stepped back, chests heaving, the madness slowly dying in their eyes. The Mormons were all down now. Some lay still, moaning softly. Others writhed in agony. Blood poured from several noses, and one man had an ugly two-inch gash over his eye. Hiram Page lay crumpled in a heap, his face deathly pale. He had been whipped savagely.

  At that moment, from behind them, there was the sound of a gunshot. Joshua and Pitcher whirled around. It had come from a cabin down near the edge of the settlement. They broke into a run, the men falling in behind them. As they came pounding up to the cabin, two men came out, one jamming a pistol back into the belt of his trousers. Through the open door, Joshua could see a woman kneeling at the side of a man in a low bed, sobbing hysterically. As she swayed back and forth, Joshua saw that the man’s head was covered with blood, as was the front of the woman’s nightdress where she had held him to her.

  “What happened here?” Pitcher demanded.

  The man with a pistol, a farmer who lived south of Independence, swung around and glared belligerently back into the cabin. “We told him to get up and come out, but he wouldn’t.”

  The woman whirled around. “My husband is very ill,” she sobbed. “He can’t get up.”

  The other man laughed, a little nervously. “In bed or out—if you’re gonna get a beating, I guess it doesn’t make a lot of difference where.”

  “We heard a shot,” Joshua said. His eyes kept being drawn to the sight of the man’s head.

  “I told him to get out of that bed or we’d blow his brains out,” the man with the pistol growled. “He didn’t, so I shot him.”

  “Don’t look like you killed him,” the Reverend Mr. Pixley said. And with that the men quickly lost interest. Pitcher turned and started back toward the horses. The men followed him.

  For a moment Joshua stood there, listening to the shuddering sobs from the woman. Finally, he stepped inside the cabin. “Get back,” he commanded.

  Frightened, the woman moved away from her husband. “Don’t hurt him!” she cried. “Don’t hurt him.”

  Joshua bent over, peering at the man’s head. He grimaced, then felt his jaw relax. The man with the pistol had been standing just a few feet away, but fortunately he was a lousy shot. The ball had grazed the top of the sick man’s skull, taking the hair and the flesh with it, but it had not pierced the bone.

  Straightening, Joshua was surprised by the intensity of his relief. His hatred for the Mormons and his desire for vengeance burned as hot as anyone’s, but he stopped short of murdering a sick man in his bed while his wife watched.

  He turned and strode to the door. “It’s just a flesh wound,” he said gruffly. “He’ll be all right.” He plunged out of the door and into the night.

  As he headed back toward the main body of men, he stopped. Pitcher had his horse backed up to Hiram Page’s cabin. A rope snaked upward to the topmost pole that formed the roof. The horse strained as the rope tightened and the animal took the full load, hooves clawing for a grip on the frozen ground. There was a tortured screeching sound, then an explosive crash. Even in the darkness Joshua saw the clouds of dust billowing upward. When the other men saw Pitcher’s success, they darted to their own horses, whooping their approval.

  Joshua nodded in satisfaction. Now, this was more like it. Let the Mormons dig out their furniture and personal belongings from that mess and maybe they’d start getting the message.

  Ten minutes later, as they reached the same spot where they had stopped earlier, Joshua turned back to look. There were no lights now, and he could not make out any of the cabins in the darkness. But he knew there were ten or twelve of them unroofed, and at least eight men who were likely to be wiser and more amenable to counsel. He smiled faintly toward the darkness. It was not a bad night’s work for this Halloween.

  In spite of the noise that filled the room, Rachel had finally fallen asleep in the corner along with three other of the smaller children. Jessica watched her for a moment, her eyes warm with love. The last four nights had been hardest on the children, and it was good to finally have them feel secure enough to sleep soundly.

  The night after the Halloween raid against the Whitmer settlement, the leaders of the Church counseled the members living in isolated homesteads to come to where there were greater concentrations of members. In Kaw Township the main settlement was the Colesville Branch. Though the Joshua Lewis family lived no more than a mile from there, Brother Lewis still decided to heed the call. They moved to the settlement that next afternoon, taking Jessica and Rachel with them. Though circumstances were challenging—three or four families in one- or two-room cabins—Jessica did not regret their decision. The previous night they had stood outside and watched the night sky lit up with the eerie glow from burning haystacks and barns. One of the fires came from the Lewis homestead.

  She turned away from Rachel as Parley P. Pratt raised his hands. “All right,” he called, “let’s have a little order here.”

  As the group gradually quieted, Jessica looked on this gentle and humorous man with admiration and respect. Over the past two years she had watched “Brother Parley” cheerfully bear sickness and hardship, walk barefoot six miles to teach the School of the Prophets in Zion, preach sermons that made her cry, and tell stories that left her sides aching with laughter.

  As Parley waited for the crowd to quiet, one hand absently stole to his forehead and rubbed gingerly at the ugly red scab that was there. That was yet another thing which added to Jessica’s immense respect for this man. Three nights before, the guards posted to watch the settlement had discovered two armed Missourians. A fight erupted, and when Parley, who was unarmed, stepped forward to help, one of the Missourians whipped out his pistol and struck Parley a savage blow to the head. Parley staggered back, blood streaming down his face, as the other men angrily seized the mobber and pinned his arms. The next morning, at Parley’s urging, the two men had been given back their guns and released without harm.

  Finally, as Parley now called for order again, the group quieted. Newel Knight, who was the branch president for the settlement, stood next to Brother Parley. “Brothers and sisters,” he said, “we have some news, but there is still no report from our brethren who went to aid the Whitmer settlement.”

  There were murmurs of disappointment, and instantly the tension in the room shot up. About midmorning, more than four ho
urs ago now, a brother from the Whitmer settlement, which was three or four miles east of their location, had ridden in to raise an alarm. The mobbers had returned. A ferry on the Big Blue River operated by the members there had been seized and the owners driven off. Rumors were also flying that the mob was on the rampage, destroying homes and property located east of the river. Brother Knight had called for volunteers and nineteen men had left immediately. It was not hard to tell which women were wives or daughters of the volunteers, for their faces were deeply etched with concern now.

  “We do have news from Independence,” Brother Parley spoke up. Immediately the murmuring stopped and the room went quiet. “As you know, three nights ago in the city, the brethren drove away a mob who were in the midst of destroying the Gilbert and Whitney store. One man was captured in the very act of brickbatting the store, a man by the name of Richard McCarty.”

  There were some mutterings from some of the men. This was something that chafed at all of them. Sidney Gilbert and others had taken the man before the justice of the peace and asked for a warrant against him. Though McCarty had been caught in the very act of destroying the store by three or four witnesses, the justice blandly refused to act and released the man.

  “Well,” Parley said, grim faced and angry, “guess what happened today? Mr. McCarty went to that same justice of the peace this morning. He has obtained a warrant for the arrest of Brother Gilbert, Brother Corrill, and others. They have been placed in the county jail and will be tried this afternoon.”

  A gasp of shock swept through the room. “On what charges?” someone cried.