Pillar of Light

by Gerald N. Lund

  “No!” With each answer the sound grew louder and more angry. The rafters above them seemed to tremble now.

  “Are they growing stronger with every passing day?”

  “Yes!”

  “Are we going to stand for that kind of deceit and treachery?”

  “No! No! No!”

  He stood and watched them shaking their fists at him, as though he were the enemy now. This was good. They had been angry before. Now they were approaching genuine rage.

  Up came his hands again, cutting off the sound. “Who, then, is willing to march with us to put these Mormons out of the state once and for all?”

  There was a response, but suddenly the unanimity was gone.

  “What was that?” Sharp roared at them. “I didn’t hear your answer. How many are willing to take up arms? Right now! Here! Tonight! Come on, let me hear it.”

  Several cried out, shaking their fists, but others were looking around with some concern. It was one thing to bellow yes at the top of your lungs, another to get a rifle and ride against the Mormons. For all that they were hated, no one underestimated their combined strength.

  “What about the Nauvoo Legion?” someone in the back yelled.

  Sharp swung on him, his eyes like molten fire, but he could not tell who it was. “The Nauvoo Legion has been disbanded.”

  “That’s not what we hear,” another man grumbled, half under his breath but loud enough for most to hear. “Maybe they ain’t legal anymore, but there are still four thousand of them out there waiting for us.”

  Sharp knew they had just reached a critical point—a point that, fortunately, had not been totally unforeseen by him. “My friends, my friends,” he soothed, “I am not talking about marching on Nauvoo. The Mormons are too strong for us there, I’ll grant you that. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.”

  Williams was on his feet now, his mouth pulled back so that he had the look of a wolf sizing up a downed stag. “We don’t have to march nineteen miles to Nauvoo to find Mormons,” he shouted. “There’s a whole settlement of them just six miles from here.”

  Now the men were looking at each other in surprise.

  “Yes!” he bellowed. “I’m talking about the Morley Settlement. I’m talking about Lima, just a few miles beyond that. How many of the Nauvoo Legion are there down there, I ask you?”

  “Not enough to stop the Warsaw militia!” a voice shouted, and Sharp noted with satisfaction that it was the same man who had first cried out about the Nauvoo Legion. As Williams kept hollering at them, whipping them with his contempt, Sharp turned and gave Worrell a questioning look. Worrell kept his face impassive but gave one brief nod. “Do it!” Sharp commanded softly. “Now’s the time.” Worrell nodded, stood, and slipped out the side door.

  “Citizens,” Sharp cut in, taking the podium back from Williams, “everywhere you look now there are Mormons. The Morley Settlement, Lima, Ramus, Plymouth. I tell you, they’re taking over the county. They keep it up and soon none of us will have any property rights. They’re like the tentacles of some great octopus, reaching out in every direction, taking our lands, corrupting our political processes, taking over what is legitimately ours. Are we going to stand for that?”

  “No!”

  “We have a new sheriff in Hancock County, one Jacob Backenstos.”

  A chorus of boos and jeers greeted the mention of that name.

  “If ever there was a Jack Mormon, Backenstos is it. I ask you, how did a man like Backenstos, a Mormon-lover, ever get elected sheriff?”

  “Because the Mormons put him in!” a man exclaimed.

  “That’s right!” Sharp said, pounding his fist against the stand. “And we let them. We are the ones who have let them get so strong. We are the ones who let them keep moving in all around us. How many others—Mormons or Jack Mormons—are going to be telling us how to live? Is that what you want?”

  He turned his head. Worrell had come back in and was standing by the side door. When he caught Sharp’s eye, he nodded once.

  Sharp turned back to the crowd. Now it was pandemonium. Some were shouting no. Others were shaking their fists. Some were cursing the name of their new sheriff.

  “Then I say we start here,” Sharp yelled. “Let’s get out there and teach these Mormons a lesson. We can’t attack them in Nauvoo, but we can go after these other settlements. If we drive all the outlying Mormons into Nauvoo, then maybe the state will help us drive them from Illinois. I say let our answer to them be with powder and ball.”

  He stopped, noting again that at the mention of violence some still seemed to shrink back.

  “Who’s with me now?” he cried. “Who will—”

  Blam! A window at the back of the room shattered, spraying glass over several seated beneath it. Blam! Blam! Blam! Three more rifle shots cracked out. A second window exploded. A ball lodged in the ceiling and dust and plaster rained down. Men screamed and dove for cover. Those nearest the door bolted blindly, smashing into those who couldn’t see into the room and weren’t sure what was happening. Men pulled the benches over the top of them to hide. The noise was deafening, the panic complete.

  Moving with some speed, but certainly not in a panic, Sharp dropped to a crouch and scuttled backwards to where Williams and Worrell were likewise hunched over. Like Sharp, they seemed calm. They certainly were not scrambling for cover. “We’re under attack,” Sharp noted dryly.

  Worrell was grinning. “Must be those crazy Mormons.”

  Sharp laughed softly. “Agreed. Why don’t you take some men and go after them?”

  Worrell was up immediately, waving his hands. “It’s the Mormons! It’s the Mormons! After them!” He rushed forward, shoving men roughly out of his way. Half a dozen men leaped to their feet and rushed out after him.

  He was gone seven or eight minutes. By the time he returned, order had been restored, though no one had returned to the seats by the windows. Worrell came striding in with three men behind him.

  “Who was it?” “Did you find them?” “Did you get them?” came the shouts as he came back into the schoolroom.

  He shook his head in disgust. “It was two riders. They got away. Headed south.”

  “South!” Sharp roared, bringing every head back around to look at him. “The Morley Settlement. They’re from the Morley Settlement.”

  Now the answering cry was ugly, frightening, totally united.

  “Powder and ball!” Sharp cried. “Tomorrow I want the word to go out across the whole area. Gather every man with a rifle. Tomorrow afternoon we ride against Yelrome. Let’s get them! Let’s teach those Mormons they can’t frighten honest men!”

  Solomon Garrett was whistling softly as he rode along the road that led south to Yelrome. It was a beautiful late afternoon. The terrible storm of the week before seemed to have ended the last spell of hot weather. The days had become pleasant and the nights were starting to take on the first touch of coolness. He looked to the west. The sun was just approaching the western horizon and had turned the high wispy trails of clouds gold and would soon turn them again into fiery reds and oranges. There was a light breeze out of the west which stirred the cornstalks and wheat fields that stretched out on either side of him. Ahead somewhere an unseen meadowlark was putting heart and soul into a song praising the ending of another day. Solomon leaned back in his saddle, feeling a great contentment.

  Things in Bear Creek had gone better than expected, and it looked like by October they might get their first common school under way. He would be in Morley Settlement in another ten minutes or so—he could already see the first buildings out ahead of him now—and Father Morley always set an ample table. Morley’s daughter Cordelia had been teaching school there since ’41. Last spring she’d had twenty-one students. He would try to convince her to become the teacher for the common school. He thought he had a good chance of doing so. That meant he would return earlier than expected and that he and the family could leave immediately for the City of Joseph.
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  He stood up in the stirrups for a moment, stretching his legs and twisting his body back and forth to unkink his muscles. Though he rode the horse often and was toughened to the saddle, he’d started out this morning just after six, and taken only a two-hour stop at Bear Creek. That meant about ten hours in the saddle, and his backside was getting tender, and the rest of his body was starting to protest as well.

  As he lowered himself back down again, the ears of his mare suddenly cocked forward and she turned her head around, as though trying to see back down the road they had just traversed. Curious now, Solomon turned in the saddle and peered back. About a mile behind him, there was a T in the road that was the junction between Green Plains and Warsaw to the west, Bear Creek and Carthage to the east, and Yelrome to the south. He had come from the east and taken the left turn for Yelrome just a quarter of an hour before. At that time, the road had been completely empty. Now suddenly it was filled with a large cloud of dust and what looked like riders in the midst of it.

  Solomon reached down and unbuckled his right saddlebag. In a moment he had in his hand the spyglass he always carried with him. His mother had given it to him on the day he first started teaching school some ten years before. He took it everywhere with him when he was out on his circuits, because he loved to watch a soaring hawk or eagle or catch a deer or a fox or a badger. It took him a moment to focus, but then he jerked forward a little. There were now thirty or forty riders visible and more coming from the west at every moment. As he peered through the glass, he felt the hair on the back of his head start to prickle a little. Even at this distance, he could see their rifles—some held across their laps, others pointing in the air.

  Still they came. They had their horses in that easy trot that eats up the miles without tiring the animals terribly. He watched in astonishment, absently counting. Fifty, sixty, seventy. On they came, a whole column of horsemen. There were no carriages, no wagons, no buggies. They were all men, and all were on horseback. And all armed!

  Solomon started to put the spyglass back into its case, when he froze in place. The lead horseman had just wheeled to Solomon’s right, turning off the road. He jerked the glass up again. The others were following. For a moment, he felt great relief. They were no longer coming at him. But then his brow furrowed. Where were they going? There was no side road between here and the junction. He thought quickly, remembering. A ways back he had passed a lane that led through corn and wheat fields to a farmhouse. There was also a new-looking barn, a shed or two, some corrals. Behind the outbuildings, the first of the grain harvest was stacked in neat bundles, waiting to be threshed. At the time he passed it, Solomon had wondered if it might be a Latter-day Saint family who had homesteaded there.

  Once again he went up in the stirrups, only this time standing on the tips of his toes to get as much height as possible. He brought the spyglass up. Yes! Over the fields of green he could make out the shingled roof of the barn, the stovepipe chimney of the house. He also could see heads bobbing up and down above the corn. That was where the riders were going. Unable to shake the deep uneasiness twisting down inside him, he sat back down again, chewing on his lip, wondering.

  And then he jerked forward, startling the horse, and nearly unsettling himself. There was a faint popping sound. Rifles! Pistols! From this distance they sounded like a child’s toy, but he knew better. Up came the spyglass again. And then in horror he saw a faint wisp of white smoke rising in the sky. It was not coming from the chimney. It was back farther, behind the house, behind the barn. Even as he watched, the wisp thickened and turned more gray. In moments a narrow pillar of smoke was towering upward.

  “The grain stacks!” he gasped, realizing what he was watching. As if to confirm his words, a second column, and then a third, went billowing upward. Through the magnification of the spyglass, his eye caught a movement. A tiny point of orange arched upwards, tumbling over and over. He stared, then sucked in his breath again. It was a torch, trailing a tiny wisp of black smoke. He watched in horror as it dropped onto the roof of the barn.

  He didn’t need to watch any more. He jammed the spyglass back in the saddlebag, wheeled the horse around so she faced back toward Yelrome again, and put spurs to her. “Go, girl!” he shouted. “Go!”

  Brother Isaac Morley was nearly sixty now. His hair was white, his face deeply lined. He had been one of the first of the converts in Kirtland when the missionaries came through there in the latter part of 1830 and early 1831. The Morley farm had been the center for much Church activity during the ensuing years. For nine years Father Morley had been a counselor to Bishop Edward Partridge. He had fled to Missouri when the apostates drove the Saints out of Kirtland, and he had helped found Far West. Except for the very first years of the Restoration, he had been part of virtually every major event associated with the Church’s history.

  Now he was all business. “So what are the latest reports?”

  Besides Sister Morley and one of their daughters, there were three other Yelrome residents in Morley’s kitchen. One, Solomon knew well. That was Brother Solomon Hancock. The other two men, Walter Cox and Edwin Whiting, were counselors in the branch presidency to Brother Morley.

  Brother Cox stepped forward. “So far there have been only two reported burnings—Brother Durfee’s grain stacks and his house and barn, and the house of John Edmondson. Once the mob rode away, Brother Durfee and his family were able to put out the flames before too much damage was done. Brother Edmondson sustained greater loss.”

  “Where is the mob now?”

  Brother Whiting shrugged. “There are a lot of antis in Lima. Some of the mob seem to be holing up with them for the night. Some may have gone back to Green Plains.”

  “Maybe it’s over,” Brother Cox suggested.

  Solomon shook his head. “There are two or three hundred men mounted and armed. They may have gone to roost for the night, but it isn’t over. They’re looking for battle.”

  Solomon Hancock nodded. “I’m afraid Brother Garrett is right.”

  “Watchmen?” Morley asked.

  “Posted everywhere. If they reappear, we’ll know about it immediately.”

  “We also sent a fast rider north to tell President Young,” Brother Cox added. “He left immediately, while the mob was still milling around south of town, so we assume he won’t run into any trouble. He should be in Nauvoo within the hour.”

  “Do you know what’s ironic?” Isaac Morley asked quietly. Suddenly, he looked much older than his sixty years. Each of the other men watched him. “We were going to leave tomorrow.”

  Solomon nodded. That explained why there were boxes all around and piles of folded linen and clothing. Since Solomon was the only one who was not from here and didn’t know the story, Morley spoke to him directly. “Last February there was some trouble with the antis. Colonel Williams again. I slipped away and rode to Nauvoo to tell President Young. He sent me back, but he counseled me to get my family, make Brother Hancock here the branch president, and move to Nauvoo.”

  He shook his head, staring now into the dead fireplace. “But I decided I had to get things ready first. I’ve got a business here. I employ twelve men in my cooper’s shop.”

  Solomon nodded. Isaac Morley’s barrels were renowned for being some of the best made in all of western Illinois. He had a brisk business selling them down at Quincy for the river trade.

  “There’s the granary, the livestock, my crops. I decided if I could just get things in order first . . .” He looked away. “Tomorrow. We planned to leave tomorrow.”

  “We are leaving tomorrow,” his wife said firmly. “First thing, we are packing the wagon and following President Young’s counsel.”

  He brightened a little at that. “Yes,” he said, looking at her gratefully. “Yes, tomorrow. Good.” His shoulders lifted and fell. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing more to do now than wait. Keep our guard up. Be prepared for whatever tomorrow shall bring.”

  They all nodded at that. The gentle o
ld man turned to Solomon. “Will you stand with us, Brother Garrett? We know this isn’t your problem, but we need every man we can muster.” There was no hesitation. “Of course. If the mob heads north for the other settlements, I’ll have to go for my family, but I don’t think that’s their intent.” His mouth pulled down. “At least not yet. So I shall stay here with you and see it through.”

  “Thank you.”

  He gave a short, mirthless laugh. “And I thought I was coming down here to talk about schools.”

  They were up early. Sister Morley fixed them a quick breakfast, and then Father Morley called for a short meeting with the leading brethren of the town. There were eight or ten present. As they gathered, grim faced, in the yard in front of the cooper shop, Solomon Garrett saw that while there was determination in their eyes, there was also a great sense of foreboding. One or two carried rifles, but for the most part the Saints had no weapons. And if they had, they were not sure if they were expected to use them or not.

  Morley waited until the last of the men had come in, and then raised one hand for silence. “Brethren, thank you for coming.”

  There were solemn nods all around.

  “Last night a mob attacked and burned two homes of our brethren. Perhaps they will be back today. We have sent to President Young for counsel. Until then we need to be wise—on our guard and yet wise in our response. We know what happened in Missouri. We do not want another Haun’s Mill here.”

  He motioned for Brother Solomon Hancock to step up beside him.

  “Brethren, though it is a time of peril, I feel that I must leave you. This is not out of fear, but out of determination to accept the counsel of one of God’s servants, which I should have done some time ago.”

  There was no surprise at that, and Solomon Garrett realized that Father Morley’s situation was known to all.

  “I shall be loading the wagons with my furniture and goods this morning and leaving you. As you know, President Young has designated Brother Hancock to be the new branch president.” He laid a hand on Hancock’s shoulder. “I need not tell you that you are in good hands with Brother Hancock.”