The Missouri PersecutionsRoberts, B. H. (Brigham Henry)
History
The Missouri Persecutions
Roberts, B. H. (Brigham Henry)
Latter Day Saints -- Missouri -- History -- 19th century
As night drew her sable mantle over the ghastly scene about Haun's
Mill, those who had escaped to the woods returned to learn the fate of
their friends. I need not dwell upon the horrors of that awful night in
which wives with bursting hearts sought for their husbands, and mothers
searched for their sons among the mangled bodies of the dead. Nor need
I pause to relate in detail the sights revealed by the morning light.
According to the statement of the leaders of the mob, they had fired
seven rounds each, making in all some sixteen hundred shots fired at a
company in which there were not more than thirty men. Nineteen of the
men and boys were killed outright in this inhuman butchery, and some
twelve to fifteen were wounded more or less severely. The few men who
escaped with their lives, the following day carried the bodies of the
slain to an old vault which had been dug for a well, and there the
butchered were interred in haste, as those performing these sad offices
were under fear every moment that the mob would return to massacre the
survivors of the tragedy of the day before.
This Haun's Mill butchery may very properly be regarded as the first
fruits of Governor Boggs' exterminating order. On the twenty-eight of
October, Colonel Jennings, of Livingston County, had entered into a
treaty of peace with the saints at Haun's Mill, and each party agreed
to use whatever of influence it possessed for peace; and while we
cannot learn whether that same colonel was in the company which did the
killing or not, still it is known that a few days after the massacre,
he, in company with other leading men in upper Missouri, among whom
was Mr. Ashby, member of the State legislature from Chariton, went
about threatening the lives of the survivors, stealing their property,
laying waste their crops and running off their stock. My own view of
the circumstances is that after the treaty of peace entered into on the
twenty-eighth, Colonel Jennings' men, with other mob forces, heard of
the exterminating order of Governor Boggs, and gathered together under
the leadership of Comstock and undertook to carry out the monstrous
edict that was worthy only of a Nero, a Caligula, or a Domitian.
CHAPTER XLI.
THE BETRAYAL OF FAR WEST.
In the meantime the mob forces, called "the governor's troops," had
gathered about Far West to the number of two thousand two hundred men,
armed and equipped for war. The main body of these forces had marched
from Richmond under the command of Major General Samuel D. Lucas,
starting on the 29th of October. The following day he was joined by the
forces of General Doniphan at the ford of Log Creek, not far from Far
West. Here they received the exterminating order of Governor Boggs.
This order made no provisions for the protection of the innocent, the
"Mormons" were either to be exterminated or driven from the State,
regardless of their guilt or innocence as individuals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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