by James W. Ure
Around noon on June 24, 1844, Joseph and Hyrum and a handful of other Mormons started for Carthage where Joseph was to be tried. They were accompanied by non-Mormon militia from McDonough County, who met them en route.17
When they arrived in Carthage, the scene turned ugly. The McDonough County militia fell away, and the Mormons were surrounded by troops from Warsaw and Carthage, who taunted with epithets and derision.
“Stand away, you McDonough boys, and let us shoot the damned Mormons!”
“God damn you, Old Joe, we've got you now.”18
Governor Ford was worn down. He was dealing with both flooding on the Mississippi as well as insurrection and a serious breach of the First Amendment.
The two Smith brothers were immediately placed in a large cell on the second floor of the Carthage Jail.19 Governor Ford came to the jail and talked with Joseph for several hours, according to the eyewitness reports of John Bernhisel and John Taylor. The governor and Joseph came to an agreement on everything but the wrecking of the Expositor. “The press in the United States is looked upon as the great bulwark of American freedom,” Governor Ford insisted, “and its destruction in Nauvoo was represented and looked upon as a high-handed measure, and manifests to the people a disposition on your part to suppress the liberty of speech and of the press.”20
Joseph protested that his women had been slandered and called the Expositor an “infamous and filthy sheet.”21 Ford told Joseph he would go to Nauvoo to address the Mormons and agreed to take Joseph with him, since the prophet feared that only the governor stood between him and the angry militia outside the jail.22
The next day Governor Ford was warned that real trouble was brewing, but the governor dismissed it. Breaking his promise to Joseph, he decided to go to Nauvoo without him. He ordered the troops disbanded.23
Willard Richards and John Taylor, both staunch pillars of the Mormon community, were allowed in the jail, and Richards told Joseph that the governor had broken his word. Joseph quickly dashed off a note to assemble the Nauvoo Legion and come and break him out of jail “at all costs.” He gave it to Jonathan Dunham and expected him to speed the fifteen miles to Nauvoo. In fact, for inexplicable reasons, Dunham never delivered the message.24
Meanwhile, Joseph sent for some wine and sipped a little. Outside the jail they heard shouts and shots. Instead of the Nauvoo Legion coming like the cavalry, it was the Warsaw Militia, fury in their eyes and murder in their hearts. With arms smuggled in by friends, Joseph had a revolver and Hyrum a single-barrel pistol. Taylor and Richards were unarmed. The four men pushed to keep the heavy door of the cell shut, but when a bullet pierced the door, they stood back. The door was forced open. Hyrum was immediately shot in the nose, shouting, “I am a dead man!” as he fell. Four more shots from the militia's muzzles struck his body.25
Joseph now fired all six shots at the onrushers. Three misfired, but three struck home. Lead poured into the cell. John Taylor was hit by five bullets, but a potentially fatal shot struck his vest pocket watch, saving his life. Willard Richards, a big man, somehow dodged every shot fired at him and remained unscathed. His pistol empty, Joseph flung it at the oncoming men, crying, “There. Defend yourselves as well as you can.”26 He sprang to the open window of the cell.
“Is there no help for a widow's son?” he cried out.27
A ball from a militiaman's musket took him in the back, and he slowly pitched forward. He hung to the sill for an instant. Below, Levi Williams, the colonel in charge of the Warsaw Militia, shouted, “Shoot him! God damn him! Shoot the damned rascal.”28
Joseph was heard to say, “Oh Lord, my God!” and he fell to the ground.29
A militiaman dragged a still-living Joseph against a well in the yard. Colonel Williams ordered four men to fire. As the balls struck, Joseph winced and fell forward, landing on his face. The same militiaman who had propped him against the well came at Joseph with a knife, intending to cut off his head. It is Mormon legend that at that moment the clouds parted and the late-evening sun sent a beam down on the prophet as he lay bleeding. “The arm of the ruffian that held the knife fell powerless,” said William Daniels, a witness who eventually joined the Mormon Church. “The muskets of the four who fired fell to the ground, and they all stood like marble statues, not having power to move a single limb of their bodies. By this time most of the men had fled in great disorder. I never saw so frightened a set of men before.”30
Joseph's death would come to be known as “the martyrdom.”31
How to define the founder of Mormonism has been a question with a thousand different answers since his death. Perhaps the best one is, “Joseph Smith did not offer himself as an exemplar of virtue,” wrote Bushman in Rough Stone Rolling. Rather, “it was his iron will that brought the church, the cities and the temples into existence.”32
The murder of Joseph Smith was due to his destruction of a newspaper.
Brigham Young, successor to Smith, vowed that it was inevitable that Joseph Smith's blood, and the blood of all martyrs to the faith, would be atoned for. Their blood, he said, was “crying to God, day and night, for vengeance.”33
An oath of vengeance was sworn by every Mormon beginning in 1845 if they went through the temple endowment ceremony. It was not until 1930 that the temple endowment ceremony was changed to exclude the blood atonement ritual.34
“Modern Mormon authorities insist blood atonement was a ‘rhetorical device’ and ‘has never been practiced by the Church at any time,’ but historian Juanita Brooks concluded that blood atonement was a ‘literal and terrible reality.35 Brigham Young advocated it and preached it without compromise,’” wrote Will Bagley in Blood of the Prophets.36
Blood atonement illustrated the depth of anger held by the church toward its enemies.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
—John Quincy Adams
Brigham Young had achieved unique status among the Mormon hierarchy, but he was away from Nauvoo on a political mission at the time of Joseph's murder. Meanwhile, thousands of Mormons in Nauvoo were being tugged and pulled by men claiming to be the next leader of the church.
Brigham returned and convinced most of Nauvoo's Mormons to accept the Twelve Apostles as collective leaders. He headed the Twelve.1
He had to unite two distinct factions: the supporters of polygamy and the anti-polygamists. Brigham, devoted to Joseph and his ideals, was determined to carry out the martyred prophet's plans to complete the Nauvoo Temple, expand the practice of polygamy, and establish a politically autonomous Kingdom of God on Earth.2
Many saw Brigham Young as a usurper. It was inevitable that schisms would cleft the youthful religion, left in a power void upon the death of Joseph. Brigham moved quickly to consolidate his leadership in light of claims to the presidency of the church by Mormons like Samuel Smith, the prophet's brother, who died of unknown causes within several weeks. Another brother of the prophet, William, accused Brigham of poisoning Samuel. Young had been away on the mission at the time of Samuel's death, so it seemed unlikely that he'd been able to connive to have him killed.3
Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were a study in contrasts. Joseph was tall, athletic, with a prominent nose and a retreating forehead. In dress he was a dandy. His rhetoric could soar. Brigham was shorter and barrel-chested. In spite of his forty-plus years, Brigham had a full shock of sandy red hair. Brigham's speech was simple, direct, and forceful. At times it could be coarse. Wisely, he chose not to emulate Joseph.4
Brigham still publicly denied that polygamy was being practiced. A pattern of dissent met by excommunication was firming Brigham's hand and would form the basis for keeping the flock in line to the present day.
Brigham bought arms for his military organization, and they were prepared to use them. He conducted surveillance on visitors and ejected dissenters. The threat of impending warfare bonded the Mormons of Nauvoo and consolidated Brigham's position.5
Brigham
had become his people's leader. He was “passionately devoted to the martyred prophet, and his life's work became carrying out the prophet's plans.”6
In August 1845, in a protest against a huge win by Mormons in the local elections, mobs began burning Mormon homes in a nearby part of the county. The violence escalated. Time was running out for the Mormons in Nauvoo, and everyone knew it. A delegation from Governor Ford, including Congressman Stephen Douglas, put pressure on Brigham to leave Illinois quickly and peacefully in the spring of 1846. In return, the Mormons were promised protection from their threatening neighbors. Brigham hoped for a reasonable settlement on the sale of Mormon-owned property, but that would not happen.7
The Mormons displayed enough willingness to fight that the mobs had backed off. Everyone waited anxiously. As John G. Turner wrote, “Young knew when to cut his losses. The Latter-day Saints would be driven, but their expulsion felt like a deliverance from a far worse fate.”8 Young was ready to lead the Mormons from their Egypt, and he set about making plans.
By 1845 Brigham was thinking of Upper California as a new Zion for Mormonism. This was a vast slab of geography claimed by Mexico—present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. The Mormons decided to go.9
In December 1845, a grand jury in Springfield, Illinois, after hearing persistent reports of counterfeiting by the Mormons, indicted Brigham and eleven other church members. The church probably was counterfeiting. Clearly, cash was hard to come by in Nauvoo.10
The law came calling again, determined to arrest Brigham. In an act Brigham would love to tell in later years, William Miller, an early convert to Mormonism, appeared outside the temple and deceived the officers into believing he was Brigham Young. They arrested Miller and took him to Carthage before a former member of the church revealed the error.11
Brigham wanted to complete the Nauvoo Temple before leaving and rushed the work throughout the fall and winter of 1845. By early December the temple rooms were ready.12
“For Young, the Nauvoo Temple was central to his furtherance of Joseph Smith's theology, built around sealing together patriarchal families headed by faithful saints exalted as priests, kings, and—one day—gods,” according to Turner.13
Brigham was furious when the secrets of the temple ceremony—including “grips and tokens”—were publicly displayed as he was greeted on the street by those who had been part of the temple rituals. The penalty for revealing the ceremonies was “gruesome death.”14
Brigham could blast his flock with criticism, but he also had a playful side and was not above joking with his followers. He encouraged the presence of music, dancing, and spiritual beauty in the temple. On December 17, having completed the day's rituals, “[w]hile under the power of animation,” Young “danced before the Lord.” Young was torn about combining merriment with spiritual zeal, but dancing, plays, and music would become part of the heritage of the church.15
As the days in Nauvoo dwindled, Brigham stepped up his courtship and secretly began adding more wives.16 Young's fifty-five wives ranged in age from sixteen to sixty, and he continued marrying until 1872. He had fifty-six children by sixteen of his wives, of which forty-six lived to adulthood. Not all of his marriages resulted in sexual liaisons; some of his wives were widows in need.17
Interestingly, in 1845, John D. Lee (who will later figure prominently in this narrative) vied with Brigham for the hands in marriage of two sisters, Louisa and Emmeline Free. Brigham saw Emmeline and fell in love with her. Lee would tell a council that “Brigham told him if he would give up Emeline [sic] to him he would uphold him in time and eternity & he never should fail, but that he would sit at his right hand in his kingdom.”18 Swapping the sexual for the spiritual was good enough for Lee. Brigham married the pretty Emmeline when she was nineteen, and Lee apparently had no resentments, as he came to view Brigham as a surrogate father.19
For West is where we all plan to go some day.
—Robert Penn Warren
“We will go to a land where there are at last no old settlers to quarrel with us,” Young prophesied.1
He would leave to create an empire and take a stand in the unsettled West. He wanted to be “500 miles from here” ten days hence. In fact, three hundred miles of mud lay between him and the next place where they would temporarily settle on the Missouri River.2
For the several months thousands of Mormons straggled out of Nauvoo and slogged west through the churned-up mud, pursued by vigilantes, with some Mormons being whipped. They sold their homes for pennies on the dollar, and many gave them without recompense as they fled in haste and fear. Their Illinois neighbors who descended on Nauvoo took over their homes and remaining property.3
As they headed west, a new chapter was about to begin in the turbulent relationship between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the federal government. It has been carried into the twenty-first century.
Brigham Young, contrary to some Mormon apocrypha, knew exactly where he was taking his flock. Young and other apostles had pored over maps of the American West. They studied John C. Fremont's narratives of his travels to California, which included a section of what he called the Great Interior Basin, part of Mexico's Upper California. Fremont described a vast land of mountain ranges and sage valleys, a “region peopled…miserably and sparsely.”4 By early 1846 Brigham knew where they would settle—a valley near Utah Lake.5
The Mormon leaders wanted a sanctuary free of white settlements. They'd learn to deal with nature and the elements. In the Great Basin the Mormons could establish an autonomous religious and political society. It was as far away from the federal government in the District of Columbia as it was from its Mexican landlord. Brigham hoped to make it to the Great Basin in the fall of 1846.6
The Mormon refugees began crossing the Mississippi on February 6, 1846. For weeks they straggled across southern Iowa, the wagons like a string of ants between the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers.7
Progress of the demoralized Mormons was slow. The weather was terrible; hunger and disease beset the pioneers. Brigham realized that the snow and mud of late winter and spring would prevent the wagons from reaching the Great Basin that year.8
Along the trail, Brigham goaded his struggling flock with patience and good humor—or spiritual bullying. At one point he threatened dissenters with a “slap of revelation.”9 He brooked no challenges to his leadership. William Clayton observed with jealousy how much lumber Brigham and other top leaders received to build their comfortable wagons, but he wisely kept his anger to himself. Brigham Young was an outstanding organizer, and it was this attribute that finally allowed him to consolidate his leadership, leaving behind any doubt about who should replace Joseph Smith.10
The Mormons saw much of this arduous trial through the prism of the Old Testament. Brigham was their Moses. The hard-frozen Mississippi River enabled many to cross with ease; there was also the Miracle of the Quail, in which many wild birds (possibly passenger pigeons) settled among the Mormons and were easily subdued and eaten by the starving pioneers. They were like ancient Israelites, and they literally believed the blood of Israel flowed in their veins (Mormon admiration for Israel and the Jews is founded in this belief). They were God's chosen, and that sustained them during the toilsome path.11
By spring 1846, more than 3,500 Mormons straggled into the area around Council Bluffs, Iowa, living in tents and wagons.12 They were soon to have another miracle of sorts, and it came in the form of an emissary from the US government. Captain James Allen of the US Army arrived in Missouri in June 1846, representing Colonel Stephen Kearny's Army of the West. He brought with him news that the United States was at war with Mexico. President James Polk was in an expansionist mood. He'd secured through treaty a large portion of the Oregon Territory from Great Britain and was set upon acquiring California. Polk ordered American soldiers to advance on New Mexico and Upper California. Captain Allen wanted to recruit five hundred Mormons to join the army. The president authorized him to enlist Mormon
s in order to “conciliate them, attach them to our country and prevent them from taking part against us.”13
Distrust ran deep about Captain Allen's mission. Many saw it as a ploy to draw off the strongest males in the Mormon contingent. Brigham, however, saw it as an opportunity. He negotiated with the army to winter on Indian land across the Missouri in what is now part of the community of Florence in North Omaha. They called it Winter Quarters, and from here they would jump off to begin the crossing of the plains.14
The church was deeply in debt, and the offer of $30,000 for Mormon soldiers clinched the deal. The enlistees would turn much of the cash over to Brigham in return for his promise to care for their families in their absence. Brigham's powers of persuasion resulted in the creation of the Mormon Battalion, and five hundred Mormon men set off for Fort Leavenworth.15
America's one and only exclusively religious army made an arduous march to California, fought a battle in which they killed a dozen cattle at the San Pedro River in Arizona, captured Tucson, and suffered no casualties.16 Most returned to Great Salt Lake City in 1847–48, but a few stayed to work the gold fields in the Sierra Nevada.
Meanwhile, at Winter Quarters, Brigham was consolidating his wives into a family of sorts. It was like herding cats; some chose to leave him. In one case he pushed one from the fold for revealing to others of the temple ceremony, calling her mouth “an open sepulcher.”17
Polygamy, called celestial marriage, was discreetly practiced but was common knowledge among the Mormons. For the public at large it was kept a secret.18 The world had yet to hear the announcement that God had condoned plural wives for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
About four hundred Saints died during the winter of 1846–47.19 Life in rude huts and shelters at Winter Quarters was miserable. They fought disease, cattle theft by Indians, and browbeating by Brigham who told them to stop complaining or else they could decamp and go back to Missouri, a notion that shook even the hardiest of Mormon pioneers.