_Monday, March 25_.--About this time, Elders Kimball and Turley started on their mission to see the governor. They called on the sheriff of Ray county and the jailer for a copy of the mittimus, by which the prisoners were held in custody, but they confessed they had none. They went to Judge King, and he made out a kind of mittimus. At this time we had been in prison several months without even a mittimus; and that too for crimes said to have been committed in another county. Elders Kimball and Turley took all the papers by which we were held, or which were then made out for them, with our petition to the supreme judges, and went to Jefferson City. The governor was absent. The secretary of state treated them very kindly; and when he saw the papers, could hardly believe those were all the documents by which the prisoners were held in custody, for they were illegal. [Sidenote: The Faulty Mittimus.] Lawyer Doniphan had also deceived them in his papers and sent them off with such documents, that a change of {289} venue could not be effected in time. The secretary was astonished at Judge King acting as he did, but said he could do nothing in the premises, and if the governor were present, he could do nothing. But the secretary wrote a letter to Judge King. The brethren then started to find the supreme judges, and get writs of habeas corpus; and after riding hundreds of miles to effect this object, returned to Liberty on the 30th of March, having seen Matthias McGirk, George Thompkins and John C. Edwards, the supreme judges, but did not obtain the writ of habeas corpus in consequence of a lack in the order of commitment, although the judges seemed to be friendly. We were informed that Judge King said, that there was nothing against my brother Hyrum, only that he was a friend to the Prophet. He also said there was nothing against Caleb Baldwin, and Alexander McRae. Brother Horace Cowan was put into Liberty jail today for debt, in consequence of the persecution of the mob. _The Prophet's Epistle to the Church, Written in Liberty Prison_. [3] Liberty Jail, Clay County, Missouri, March 25, 1839. _To the Church of Latter-day Saints at Quincy, Illinois, and Scattered Abroad, and to Bishop Partridge in Particular_: