One of the circuit judges who was asked to issue a peace warrant refused to do so, but advised the “Mormons” to arm themselves and meet the force of the outlaws with organized resistance.  This advice was not pleasing to the Latter-day Saints, whose religion enjoined tolerance and peace; but they so far heeded it as to arm a small force; and when the outlaws next came upon them, the people were not entirely unprepared.  A “Mormon” rebellion was now proclaimed.  The people had been goaded to desperation.  The militia was ordered out, and the “Mormons” were disarmed.  The mob was unrestrained in its eagerness for revenge.  The “Mormons” engaged able lawyers to institute and maintain legal proceedings against their foes, and this step, the right to which one would think could be denied no American citizen, called forth such an uproar of popular wrath as to affect almost the entire state.

It was winter; but the inclemency of the year only suited the better the purpose of the oppressor.  Homes were destroyed, men torn from their families were brutally beaten, tarred and feathered; women with babes in their arms were forced to flee half-clad into the solitude of the prairie to escape from mobocratic violence.  Their sufferings have never yet been fitly chronicled by human scribe.  Making their way across the river, most of the refugees found shelter among the more hospitable people of Clay County, and afterward established themselves in Caldwell County, therein founding the city of Far West.  County and state judges, the governor, and even the President of the United States, were appealed to in turn for redress.  The national executive, Andrew Jackson, while expressing sympathy for the persecuted people, deplored his lack of power to interfere with the administration or non-administration of state laws; the national officials could do nothing; the state officials would do naught.

But the expulsion from Jackson County was but a prelude to the tragedy soon to follow.  A single scene of the bloody drama is known as the Haun’s Mill massacre.  A small settlement had been founded by “Mormon” families on Shoal Creek, and here on the 30th of October, 1838, a company of two hundred and forty fell upon the hapless settlers and butchered a score.  No respect was paid to age or sex; grey heads, and infant lips that scarcely had learned to lisp a word, vigorous manhood and immature youth, mother and maiden, fared alike in the scene of carnage, and their bodies were thrown into an old well.

In October, 1838, the Governor of Missouri, the same Lilburn W. Boggs, issued his infamous exterminating order, and called upon the militia of the state to execute it.  The language of this document, signed by the executive of a sovereign state of the Union, declared that the “Mormons” must be driven from the state or exterminated.  Be it said to the honor of some of the officers entrusted with the terrible commission, that when they learned its true