Newel and all men in the city had to surrender their arms. November 1 brought heartbreak for all Saints in Far West. Joseph Knight’s son Newel was Joseph Smith’s close friend-the Prophet had performed his and Lydia’s wedding in Kirtland, and he had no followers more loyal than Newel and Lydia. They numbered twelve families with more than sixty souls, having surnames of Knight, DeMille, Peck, Slade, Culver, and Stringham. They belonged to a large, extended family headed by Joseph Knight Sr., who converted to Mormonism in New York state in 1830, the year the Church was organized. īy October 1838, Newel and Lydia Knight and their three children were among the Saints living in and near Far West, the Church’s headquarters city. In Daviess County on Caldwell County’s north side, Saints had begun building about 150 log houses at Adam-ondi-Ahman, and as many as 1,500 Saints in total lived in Daviess County. ![]() Far West had a population by then of about five thousand Saints, and another five thousand lived in at least nineteen other Latter-day Saint communities in Caldwell County. Their chief settlement was Far West in Caldwell County. At the time, perhaps ten thousand Mormons were concentrated in two particular counties. To his military leaders, it decreed, “The Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state, if necessary for the public good.” Four days later, that order reached Church leaders and members in northwest Missouri. On October 27, 1838, three days after Missouri and Mormon militias engaged in the Battle of Crooked River, Governor Boggs issued his infamous extermination order. Kimball, and four selected families: the John and Caroline Butler family, the Newel and Lydia Knight family, the Daniel and Martha Thomas family, and the Levi and Clarissa Hancock family. Because Joseph Smith was in prison during the exodus, attention focuses here on Joseph Smith’s parents, his wife Emma, Elders Brigham Young and Heber C. The Saints’ exodus from Missouri took place mostly during winter and involved four main arenas: Far West, Missouri Quincy, Illinois a road network between the two cities and the west shore mudflats across the Mississippi River from Quincy. Their tough experiences produced definite impacts-both short- and long-term-on Missouri and Illinois, on the course of the Church, and on individual members. It was difficult, dramatic, sometimes harrowing, and only partly organized. ![]() Triggered by Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs’s October 1838 extermination order against them, some ten thousand Saints engaged in a mass exodus, many going to Quincy, Illinois. Tucked between popular Church history chapters about Liberty Jail and Nauvoo is a little-known but vitally important chapter dealing with the Latter-day Saints’ seven-month struggle to survive the winter of 1838–39 in Missouri and to leave there by spring 1839. Hartley was a professor emeritus of history at Brigham Young University when this was published.
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