She jerked away angrily. “Don’t, Nathan!”
He stepped back, hurt. “Lydia, I don’t understand you. If that were you there in Jessica’s place, would you want—”
“No!” she cried, flinging the words at him. “Don’t try to make me feel guilty. You know I care about what happens to Jessica and little Rachel. But you don’t have to be the one who rushes off to save them. Not you, Nathan.”
He threw up his hands. “I don’t believe this.” He blew out a quick breath of frustration. “I just don’t understand you anymore, Lydia.”
“Well, that’s obvious enough,” she snapped.
He was stung. “What more do you want from me?” he burst out. “Nothing I do anymore seems quite good enough for you.”
“I want you home!” she cried. “I don’t want you to leave me again. I don’t want you in Missouri.” She spun around, not wanting him to see the tears.
For a moment he stood there, wanting to hold her, not daring to. His hands came up, then dropped again.
She finally turned around, brushing at the corners of her eyes. “I need you here, Nathan,” she whispered, “as much as Jessica needs you there.”
He reached out again for her, and this time she came into his arms. “I don’t want to have another baby without you,” she said, choking back a sob. “Is that too much to ask?”
“But Lydia,” he said, speaking carefully, “you’re not due till early March. I’ll be back in a month.”
“Will you? Back from Missouri maybe. Then where? Off on another mission to the East? Or on to Canada?” Joseph and Sidney were making plans for a mission to Upper Canada.
Nathan fought back a flash of irritation. They had had this discussion too many times before. “I have to go where the Lord calls.”
She pulled away from him sharply. “The Lord has also called on the Saints to finish building his house here.”
“I’ve been working on the temple.”
She softened a little. “I know that, Nathan. So why can’t you just stay here? There’s work enough to do for the Lord right here in Kirtland.”
He sighed, fighting a hurt of his own. This had become an ever-present barrier between them now, and it frustrated him that he could not help her see it from his perspective. He missed her fiercely when he was gone. He missed the children. But other men left. Other men preached the gospel and their wives weren’t knocked off balance by it.
She looked up at him. “If Jessica had been hurt or something, then I wouldn’t stop you, Nathan. You know that. But she’s all right. And I need you, Nathan. Please don’t leave me.”
For a long moment he just held her. Then finally he nodded slowly, staring out of the window. “All right. I won’t say anything to Joseph.”
On the twenty-first day of August, 1833, a council of priesthood holders met in Kirtland and determined to send Orson Hyde and John Gould as special messengers to Zion. Upon their arrival they instructed the Saints not to dispose of their property or move from the county unless they had specifically signed an agreement to do so.
Not all Missourians agreed with the depredations going on. In August a Missouri newspaper ran a series of articles censuring the mob and encouraging the Saints to seek civil protection and redress from the state authorities. Heartened by this nominal support, the Saints spent much of September documenting the outrages committed against them and denying the charges of the old settlers. In early October, a petition having been drafted, Orson Hyde and W. W. Phelps journeyed to Jefferson City to present it to Governor Daniel Dunklin.
The petition asked for three things. The Saints wanted the state to raise troops to defend their rights. They sought the right to sue in the courts for damaged and lost property. And they asked that the mobbers be brought to justice. Governor Dunklin consulted with his attorney general for several days, then received the Mormons once again. He was not unsympathetic to their plight, he said. He abhorred the acts of the lawless elements in Jackson County, but he felt that force was not necessary to see justice done. He advised the delegates to seek redress through the local courts and law officers. If this failed, he promised to use other means to solve the problem.
The brethren went home greatly discouraged. Appeal to the local judiciary and legal officers? How bitter the irony. The signatures on the “secret constitution” that demanded the removal of the Saints from Jackson County included, among others, those of Samuel Lucas, judge of Jackson County; Samuel Owens, county clerk; Russell Hicks, deputy county clerk; John Smith, justice of the peace; Samuel Weston, justice of the peace; William Brown, constable; and Thomas Pitcher, deputy constable. And all of these were secretly assisted by none other than the lieutenant governor of the state himself, Lilburn W. Boggs. In a word, the very men who had pledged their lives and their honor to the task of driving the Saints from the county were now to be petitioned for redress? When they tried to convince Dunklin of that, their accusations fell on deaf ears.
Perhaps their journey to Jefferson City had been in vain, but with the return of the delegation an important corner was turned. The Saints had followed the admonitions of the Savior. They had turned the other cheek and submitted meekly to injustice. They had gone the second mile, and gone it again. “Now,” they said, “we cannot patiently bear these wrongs any longer; according to the laws of God and man, we have borne enough.” Members were counseled to arm themselves and protect their women and children, even with force if necessary. A group of brethren went north into Clay County and purchased powder and lead.
On October twentieth, three months to the day after the destruction of the
Evening and Morning Star,
the Church leaders formally declared their intentions to defend themselves against any more physical violence. They would not be the aggressor in any case, but the Missourians were given fair warning. The Saints were no longer to be idle spectators to their own demise.
With that declaration, the die was cast, fate was set and locked. The final confrontation between saint and settler in Jackson County was about to begin.
It was October thirty-first, 1833. On the morrow it would be what some Christians called “All Saints’ Day.” In ancient Europe, on that day, a special mass, called “Allhallowmas,” was said. The night before the mass came to be called “All Hallows’ Eve,” or more commonly, “Halloween.” An ancient Celtic festival that was also held on October thirty-first came to have an influence on the Christian celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. While many of the Celtic customs were left behind by the religious immigrants who came to America, some survived. One of the most common was the pulling of pranks and the working of mischief on Halloween night. The Celtic peoples believed that the souls of the dead were allowed to return to their homes for only one evening a year—Halloween—and when forced to return to their graves, would vent their frustration by tipping over gravestones, soaping windows, pulling down outhouses, and so forth.
Though Joshua Steed knew nothing of the origin of Halloween or why behavior that was normally forbidden was winked at on this night, as he reined his horse to a halt along the edge of the tree line he couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony. They were no longer boys, these forty or so men who rode with him and Colonel Pitcher, but they were about to do a little mischief of their own tonight.
The night was still and clear, cold and already frosting. There was a quarter moon but the night was quite dark, and he heard men curse and swear as they bumped into one another or got slapped across the face with low-hanging tree branches.
“Quiet!” Pitcher hissed. “You’ll have every Mormon in the settlement awake and waiting for us.”
Gradually the men quieted down. Beneath him, Joshua’s horse was dancing a little, sensing the tension in the humans around him. Joshua leaned down and patted his neck. “Steady, boy.”
“All right, Steed, where do we go?”
Joshua had specifically chosen to ride with Pitcher, because although Pitcher was only deputy constable of Jackson County, Joshua found him to be much more decisive and prone to action than Constable Brown. And it was action that Joshua was looking for this night. He wasn’t interested in a night of hard riding and a lot of bluster.
He prodded his horse forward a little, pointing. In the pale moonlight thin streams of smoke could be seen coming from several chimneys. Four or five dim lights glowed, outlining the windows of those cabins in which there were people still awake; but other than that, the cabins were not visible in the darker shadows of the trees that lined the Big Blue River.
“This is called the Whitmer settlement,” Joshua said to Pitcher. “The cabins are mostly on the edge of the trees that line the river. The ferry is to the left, there where the trees are thinnest.”
Pitcher half turned in his saddle. “All right, men,” he said, “you all know that the Mormons have been told to resist, to fight back.” He grinned, a look of pure enjoyment crossing his face. “That’s what they’ve been told. Do you think they’ve got the stomach to actually do it?”
There were soft cries and a bark of raucous laughter.
“Do
you
have the stomach for it?”
“Yeah!” It came out as one cry.
“Then, let’s go!” Pitcher lifted the reins and put the spurs to his horse.
“Hee yaw!” Joshua yelled. He jerked forward, laying his face next to the horse’s mane, giving it its head. Behind him the men erupted. There were screams and yells, shouts, cursings, oaths, and a pistol shot or two as they thundered across the meadows and up to the little cluster of cabins. Pitcher pulled his horse up hard and Joshua nearly ran him down.
“Fan out!” Pitcher yelled.
Joshua leaped off his horse even before it came to a halt, and hit the ground running. “Get the menfolk!” he shouted. “Don’t let any of them escape.”
Without waiting to see if he was obeyed, he pulled out his pistol, darted up to the door of one of the cabins, and threw his shoulder against it. It was made of wood slabs, loosely nailed and lashed together with strips of rawhide. It shattered inward, spewing wood everywhere. There was a woman’s terrified scream and sounds of frantic scrambling. By the light of a dying fire, he saw a woman in a white nightshirt and cap sitting up in bed, clutching the blankets around her. The whites of her eyes were like two small lamps against the surrounding darkness.
“Mama! Mama!” A three- or four-year-old girl came stumbling out from behind a blanket used as a room divider. At the sight of Joshua, she screamed and burst into tears.
In an instant the woman was out of the bed and clutching the child to her. Joshua looked around quickly. “Where’s your husband?” he demanded.
“I...I don’t know. He ran.” But her eyes darted momentarily to where a large, hand-hewn log table sat in the corner. In two steps Joshua was there, the muzzle of the pistol pointing beneath it. “Out!” he barked.
For a moment there was silence, then a scuffling sound. Joshua stepped back and let the man come out. When he stood, Joshua jerked him around so the firelight would catch his face. He nodded in satisfaction. “Why, Mr. Whitmer,” he said, “how good of you to join us.”
They found eight men all told. The rest had scattered into the night, and no amount of threatening could make the frantic women tell where their husbands had gone. Now the men stood before the mob. Standing there in their nightshirts, barefooted and with their hair disheveled, they looked small and ridiculously vulnerable.
Pitcher was gleeful as he marched back and forth in front of them. He turned to his men, who formed a half circle around their captives. “Do these look like the men who promised to fight for their women and children?”
There was a roar of laughter and cries of derision.
Joshua stepped forward. “Do you know who these men are?” he shouted.
“They’re Mormons,” one man yelled back, “that’s good enough for me.”
“They’re more than that,” Joshua said, turning to let his eyes sweep along the line. “Some of these men are Whitmers.”
Now the men of the mob seemed a little puzzled. What did they care who they were?
But Joshua cared. “The Whitmers are close friends of Joe Smith. The Whitmers helped Joe Smith with the Book of Mormon.” He stepped to the last man in the line. “Take this man here, for example.” He reached out with his riding crop and lifted the man’s head. “This here is Hiram Page. He married a Whitmer girl. Mr. Page is one of them that claims he saw an angel, the same angel that Joe Smith said he saw.”
“No,” Page said, “I saw the plates, but I never said I saw—”
But he never got a chance to finish. Suddenly the Reverend Mr. Pixley, a man sent out west to Christianize the savages who inhabited Indian Territory, leaped forward. “Blasphemy!” he cried in horror. “Blasphemy!” He hurled himself at Hiram Page, slashing across Page’s cheek the short stick he carried.
It was like a signal to the pack. The men swarmed over their captives, screaming, shouting, kicking, jabbing. Whips and clubs flashed in the pale moonlight. Joshua stepped back to stand beside Pitcher, a little shocked by the fury that he was witnessing.
Pitcher leaned over slightly. “You were right about Pixley,” he said.
Joshua nodded. The deputy constable had objected to having the good reverend ride with them, but Joshua had persuaded him otherwise. Not that Joshua had found religion. He had little more respect for these men than he did for the Mormons, but war made for strange bedfellows. Pixley and the Reverend Finis Ewing of the Cumberland Presbyterian church had been in the forefront of the opposition to the Mormons. Joshua knew that Pixley would not blanch when it came to violence, and sensed that he might be an important influence in prodding the men to action. Besides, Joshua had told Pitcher with a chuckle, the preachers lent a certain air of respectability to the whole affair.
With their fury finally spent, the men stepped back, chests heaving, the madness slowly dying in their eyes. The Mormons were all down now. Some lay still, moaning softly. Others writhed in agony. Blood poured from several noses, and one man had an ugly two-inch gash over his eye. Hiram Page lay crumpled in a heap, his face deathly pale. He had been whipped savagely.