There is simply far too much evidence not only of the existence of the Danites, but of the specific murders and assassinations carried out by thugs whose names and characters we can identify. One of the most notorious, Bill Hickman, who eventually fell out with Young, collaborated in 1872 with an anti-Mormon journalist to publish his confessions of many a murder and robbery ordered by the Prophet, under the lurid title Brigham’s Destroying Angel. And from 1838, within weeks of the founding of the secret society, a text survives in which Smith himself sums up Avard’s clandestine orders to his Danite captains. Among other duties, they were instructed “to go out on a scout of the borders of the settlements, and take to yourselves spoils of the goods of the ungodly Gentiles” and “you will waste away the Gentiles by robbing and plundering them of their property; and in this way we will build up the kingdom of God.”
In the middle of 1838, Missouri settlers indeed began to complain of goods and livestock stolen, of barns and houses burned. On July 4, in front of a large congregation, the impetuous Sidney Rigdon gave a speech that would come to be known as the “Salt Sermon,” as the orator elaborated on a passage from Matthew: “If the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under the foot of men.”
With fiery rhetoric, Rigdon made the threat to Missouri Gentiles explicit. He summed up the provocations the Saints had so far received at the hands of unbelievers, then vowed,
Our rights shall no more be trampled on with impunity. The man, or set of men, who attempt it, does it at the expense of their lives. And that mob that comes on us to disturb us, it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them till the last drop of their blood is spilled.
It was almost inevitable that fighting words such as Rigdon’s would lead to real fights. The first outbreak of violence occurred on August 6, election day in Missouri. John D. Lee, who was Brigham Young’s stepson and who later became famous for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, left an eyewitness account of what would come to be known as the “election-day riot.” In the town of Gallatin, in Daviess County, only a few miles northeast of Far West, as he lay in the grass awaiting his turn to vote, Lee heard one of the candidates for office stir up the crowd with derogations of the Saints: “They are a set of horse thieves, liars, and counterfeiters…. If you suffer the Mormons to vote in this election, it will mean the end of your suffrage.”
Moments later, the first Mormon approached the polling booth. According to Lee, a man blocked his path and sneered, “Daviess County don’t allow Mormons to vote no more than niggers.” As the Mormon protested, the settler knocked him off his feet.
Lee swore that a Danite captain in the crowd gave the secret signal to his confederates. By the captain’s own testimony, a supernatural power came to his aid, as the brawlers singled him out for attack. With a club, he leveled one Missourian after another. “I never struck a man the second time,” the captain later wrote, “and while knocking them down, I really felt that they would soon embrace the gospel.” No one was killed, but as the unbelievers fled, they left some nine men sprawled on the ground, seriously injured.
During the next two months, several pitched battles broke out between Mormons and Missourians, and the first fatalities occurred. The conflict culminated in the Haun’s Mill Massacre. Founded in 1835, Haun’s Mill was a small Mormon farming community well to the south of Independence. On October 30, a renegade militia from a neighboring county, two hundred strong, rode toward the defenseless settlement with mayhem on their minds. As the attackers came into sight, one Mormon ran out, waving his hat to sue for peace. It was to no avail. The militiamen started firing.
The women and children fled into the woods, while men and boys made a futile stand inside the blacksmith’s shop. It was a poor refuge, for the logs of which it was built were so widely spaced, the attackers could fire through the gaps. Within hours, at least eighteen Mormon men and boys were dead, and thirteen more lay wounded. According to one Mormon witness, a nine-year-old boy named Sardius Smith tried to hide under the bellows. A militiaman found him and hauled him out. Another attacker pleaded, “Don’t shoot, it’s just a boy.”
“It’s best to hive them when we can,” the first man answered. “Nits will make lice.” Then he blew Sardius’s brains out with his rifle at point-blank range.
Alarmed by the escalating bloodshed, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs ordered his regular militia to drive all the Mormons out of the state or, if they would not leave, to exterminate them. As the troops approached Far West—ten thousand strong, according to the Prophet—Smith realized that his people had no choice but to flee.
What followed remains uncertain. One version is that Major General Samuel Lucas tricked Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Parley Pratt, and two other leading Saints into surrendering, under the pretense of a meeting to negotiate a truce. But John D. Lee insisted that, in an emotional speech to his followers, Smith announced that he would surrender himself to Lucas “as a sacrifice to save your lives and to save the Church.”
With his five hostages under guard, Lucas was unbending. He issued a formal order to Brigadier General Alexander Doniphan: “Sir:—You will take Joseph Smith and the other prisoners into the public square of Far West, and shoot them at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.”
The history of the LDS church in America would be far different had Doniphan carried out his orders. Instead, risking a charge of treason, he answered in writing, “It is cold-blooded murder. I will not obey your order. My brigade shall march for Liberty to-morrow morning at 8 o’clock; and if you execute these men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God.”
Surprisingly, Lucas relented. The upshot was that Smith and his four fellow prisoners would languish for more than four months in the jail at Liberty, a small town about six miles north of Independence, as they awaited a trial that might yet levy upon them the death penalty.
Meanwhile, under a new de facto leader, Brigham Young, the Saints began their exodus from Missouri. The only direction that seemed possible for them to pursue was eastward into Illinois. Mobs of gleeful settlers descended upon Far West and ransacked it of everything of the slightest value. In Brodie’s words, “Hogs and cattle they shot for sport.”
Finally, in April 1839, Smith and the other incarcerated Mormon leaders were taken on horseback to Daviess County, the scene of their alleged crimes, to be tried by a jury of their supposed peers.
The trial never took place. With a bribe of $800 and a jug of whiskey fortified with honey that his brother Hyrum had smuggled into the midst of the caravan, Smith bought his freedom from a weak-willed sheriff. Once the man guarding him got drunk and fell asleep, Joseph and the other prisoners mounted horses and galloped north. They managed to catch up with the last stragglers from Far West and joined them as they crossed the border into Illinois.
The Garden of Eden lay behind them to the west. The new Zion of the Saints would never rise in Missouri.
STILL A MERE thirty-three years old as he entered Illinois, Joseph Smith would have only half a decade longer to live. Despite his people’s ignominious flight from the Missouri mobs, in late April 1839 the Prophet remained as forward-looking as ever. Without hesitation, he chose an uninhabited neck of land protruding into a bend of the Mississippi River as the site for his next (and last) attempt to build Zion. That neck of land, ten miles north of Keokuk, Iowa (itself a fledgling village at the time), was dominated by a high hill, but surrounded by woods and swamps, the latter the breeding ground of hordes of malarial mosquitoes. Smith declared that the new town would be named Nauvoo—Hebrew, he told his followers, for “beautiful place” or “beautiful plantation.”
Despite the topographic irregularities of the site, Smith laid out Nauvoo’s streets and building lots in a rigid rectangular grid, oriented to the cardinal directions—just as Salt Lake City would be laid out in 1847, as well as virtually every other Mormon town i
n the West thereafter. Within months, however, malaria started to take its toll. Smith himself lost his father, his youngest brother, and his youngest son.
Such setbacks in no way diminished Smith’s ambitions. In November, “armed” (as Brodie writes) “with hundreds of affidavits and petitions,” he traveled to Washington, D.C., to lay his grievances before President Martin Van Buren. Smith sought $2 million in damages from the state of Missouri. According to a reporter who was present, the president answered him with an exasperated refusal: “Help you!” he almost shouted. “How can I help you? All Missouri would turn against me.” The two men argued bitterly before Van Buren stood up and left the room. Noting the president’s corpulence, Smith told the reporter that he “hoped [Van Buren] would continue to grow fat, and swell, and before the next election burst!”
By now, Smith had organized his leading lieutenants under the lofty title the Twelve Apostles—the hierarchical designation that still obtains today. And only months after choosing the site for Nauvoo, in September 1839, he did an extraordinary thing. He ordered all twelve to go to England to make converts as fast as they could.
Brigham Young, one of the Twelve, was shocked and dismayed by the assignment. Neither he nor his second wife—the former Mary Ann Angell, whom he had married in 1834, two years after his first wife had died—had fully recovered from their malarial fevers, and only ten days before, Mary Ann had given birth to a baby. Yet, like every good Saint, Young obeyed the Prophet’s order, and set out on the English mission without a murmur of complaint.
On September 18, with his longtime friend and fellow Apostle, Heber C. Kimball, Brigham left Nauvoo. When he arrived in Liverpool, he had only 75 cents in his pocket. In their penury, Young and Kimball followed what would become a sanctified tradition of missionaries hitting the road, in the Mormon phrase, “without purse or scrip” (“scrip” meaning money, “purse” something to carry it in), the better to put themselves at the mercy of the hospitality of potential converts.
Young had left Illinois full of doubts and insecurities. When he sought advice from Smith, the Prophet blithely instructed him, “When you reach England the Lord will teach you what to do, just as He teaches me how to act here.”
The Apostles were stunned when they saw the conditions of the working-class poor in England. George A. Smith, Joseph’s cousin, wrote in a letter home, “I have seen more beggars here in one day than I saw in all my life in America.”
The Lord, however, must have worked just as Joseph had promised he would. During the single year they spent in England, the Twelve converted and baptized between eight thousand and nine thousand new Saints, published tens of thousands of tracts and copies of the Book of Mormon, and started the Liverpool-based Millennial Star: at first a monthly publication, it came out weekly starting in 1852. (The Star would cease publication only in 1970.)
The newspaper made honeyed promises about life in Illinois. The cost of a home there was only about one-eighth as much as it was in Britain. “Millions on millions of acres of land lie…unoccupied, with a soil as rich as Eden, and a surface as smooth, clear and ready for the plough as the park scenery of England.” In and around Nauvoo, the Star boasted, there was room for “more than a hundred millions of inhabitants.”
The first British converts, two hundred strong, arrived in Nauvoo in 1840. Two years later, the influx numbered 1,600. Nauvoo started to burst at the seams. In 1842, its population was counted at around seven thousand. In a mere three years of existence, the town had become the largest in Illinois. By 1844, Nauvoo’s population would swell to twelve thousand.
Rebuffed by President Van Buren, Smith continued to nurse his grudge against Missouri. On May 6, 1842, something occurred that would have deep repercussions, setting in motion a chain of events that would end with the abandonment of Nauvoo. On a windy, rainy night, Lilburn Boggs, now ex-governor of Missouri, sat reading a newspaper in the study of his home in Independence. Nearby, his six-year-old daughter rocked the cradle bearing his newborn infant.
It was Boggs, of course, who had issued the infamous “extermination order,” instructing his militia to drive the Saints out of Missouri or wipe them out. Suddenly, the windowpane shattered as pistol shots rang out. The governor was struck four times by buckshot, twice in the head and twice in the neck. Unconscious and bleeding profusely, he was not expected to live.
A crowd that quickly gathered discovered the pistol lying in the mud near the window, but the shooter had fled. Eight days later, Smith told his Nauvoo congregation that Governor Boggs had been killed. A collective gasp—perhaps a cheer—erupted. On May 28, the Wasp, the Nauvoo newspaper, editorialized, “Boggs is undoubtedly killed according to report; but who did the noble deed remains to be found out.”
Amazingly, Boggs survived, even though two of the buckshot balls remained lodged in his brain. The case has never been conclusively proven, but the assassination attempt was almost surely carried out by one Orrin Porter Rockwell, a man who would go on to become the most notorious of all the Danites. In 1870, a journalist would accuse Rockwell of having carried out more than forty murders. Brigham Young biographer Stanley Hirshson describes this formidable gunslinger:
Rockwell’s appearance was enough to frighten to death most men. Of medium height, exceptionally strong and broad-shouldered, he possessed steely, searching blue eyes, a chest as broad as a barrel, hands as hairy and powerful as bear paws, and a heavy mane of braided hair he refused to cut after Smith told him it would render him, like Samson, unconquerable.
In an excellent surviving photograph, Rockwell’s hair hangs loose, not braided, while his eyes have the blank, unyielding stare of a B-movie fanatic.
The dates of Rockwell’s temporary absence from Nauvoo coincided neatly with a possible trip to Independence. Dr. John Bennett was an 1840 convert to Mormonism who quickly rose to prominence in Nauvoo, only to fall out with Smith, who excommunicated him in June 1842. In retaliation, Bennett wrote a series of letters that were later published in book form, with the subtitle An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism. Bennett is thus perhaps an unreliable witness, but in one letter he swore that he had overheard Smith offer a $500 reward to anyone who would kill Boggs. The rumors about Rockwell having accomplished the deed were sufficiently rampant that Smith made a cryptic announcement (according to Bennett): “The Destroying Angel has done the work as I predicted, but Rockwell was not the man who shot. The Angel did it!” Meanwile, in the Wasp, Smith denied any Mormon involvement, speculating that the assassination attempt must have been carried out by one of Boggs’s political opponents.
That denial failed to satisfy the Missouri authorities, who in early August sent sheriffs to Nauvoo, where they arrested both Joseph Smith and Porter Rockwell. (Smith was arrested as “an accessory before the fact.”) The Nauvoo municipal court issued a writ of habeas corpus that freed the two men, then appointed itself to conduct an independent inquiry of the attempted murder.
Meanwhile, Rockwell fled. He wound up near Philadelphia, where he stayed in hiding through the winter. And Smith went into hiding, too, though he was never far from Nauvoo. In Brodie’s judgment, “Joseph had a thousand witnesses to prove that he had been in Nauvoo on the day of the shooting, but he was certain that extradition to Missouri meant death.”
Disheartened by exile, Rockwell decided to return to Nauvoo early in 1843. In St. Louis, as he got off the steamboat to take a walk, authorities recognized him (how could they not, with his wild hair and penetrating stare?). He was arrested and sent to Independence, where he languished in prison, shackled in leg irons, infested with lice, for nine months. In May, with a fellow prisoner, he pulled off a jail break, sawing through his leg irons, overpowering the guard, whom the two men locked in their cell, then dashing across the yard and over a twelve-foot fence. But when Rockwell lingered to help his less athletic partner, sheriff’s deputies recaptured both men.
Finally, in August, Rockwell was brought to circuit court, where to his astonishment he was told th
at the grand jury had refused to bring an indictment. When he finally returned to Nauvoo in December 1843, according to Brodie, he “was a frightening apparition. His hair hung down to his shoulders, black and stringy like a witch’s; his clothes were filthy and tattered, his shoes in shreds.”
Experts, including Rockwell’s sympathetic biographer, Harold Schindler, lean toward the conclusion that the man was most likely the assassin. For one thing, several anti-Mormon writers later related scenes in which Rockwell bragged about the deed. But whether Smith ordered the attack is a far less certain matter. In Brodie’s analysis, “Certainly he had nothing to gain from it but trouble. Since Boggs was no longer in power, there could have been no serious motive but revenge, and Joseph was not a vengeful man.”
For his part, Smith soon wearied of his fugitive life around Nauvoo. With the characteristic fatalism that always counterbalanced his messianic zeal, he came out of hiding, submitted to another arrest, and was brought to Springfield, the capital of Illinois, for a trial based on the Missouri writ demanding Smith’s extradition. It is not far-fetched to discern in the Prophet a longing, however ambivalent, for the martyrdom that would perfect his meteoric career. On January 5, 1843, in a packed courtroom, a judge who would later convert to the LDS faith declared the Missouri writ invalid. Smith was free once more.
During these tumultuous years in Nauvoo, a mass paranoia welded the community together. Yet any hope that the Mormons could live in peace, undisturbed by hostile neighbors, was dashed again and again—dashed as much as anything by Smith’s grandiosity. In 1844, he had the audacity to run for the presidency of the United States.
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