* * *
“I’m Captain Joshua Steed, adjutant to General David Atchison of the Missouri militia in Richmond, Ray County. We heard there was trouble here. The general asked that I come and survey the situation.”
The look on the face of the woman behind the counter went from suspicious to respectful in one flicker. “General Atchison, eh?” She peered at him over the top of her glasses, the one lens of which was cracked right down the center. “Heard about our war with the Mormons?”
Joshua had to pull his eyes away from staring at the broken lens. How did that affect her vision?
Are you seeing two of me
? He gave a little shake of his head. “Yes. They’re gone, then?”
She chortled with glee. “Gone like whipped dogs.” She turned and spat toward the corner spittoon. She wasn’t chewing tobacco, but her action was a perfect imitation of the men who did. It made her look all the harder and repulsive to Joshua. “Sorriest bunch of devil worshippers you ever did see. They had their tails ’twixt their legs, I’m tellin’ ya, and their Mormon prophet, old Joe Smith, with ’em.”
That bought Joshua’s full attention. “Smith was here?”
“Yup. Snuck in a few nights ago. Saw that he and his were about to be massacreed and led the whole kit and caboodle out of here yesterday afternoon. And on the run, I might add.”
“Massacred,” Joshua corrected her absently, his mind racing. So a confrontation had been avoided. All the better. “Where have the men gone? Your men, I mean. Not the Mormons. Did they go after them?”
“No,” she said, shutting one eye—the one behind the cracked glass—and squinting at him with a frown. “But they’re planning on it. Goin’ after them today sometime. They’re meetin’ at ten o’clock down at the churchyard. Why you askin’?”
But Joshua barely heard the last question. He glanced at the clock on the wall at the end of the store. It was five minutes of ten. He spun on his heel and was out the door and moving toward his horse.
* * *
Joshua dismounted and edged to the back of the large and angry group of men. As he did so, a man in a long black coat and top hat walked up to the front porch of the church and raised his hands for silence. Joshua nudged the man in front of him. He turned. Joshua held out his hand. “Joshua Steed, from Richmond. Heard I missed all the fun yesterday.”
The man shook his hand enthusiastically. “You sure did.”
“Who’s this?” he asked, gesturing toward the man who stood before the crowd.
“The Reverend Sashiel Woods.”
Joshua nodded, not really surprised. During the Jackson County war with the Mormons five years earlier, Joshua had once convinced his commanding officer to take along two ministers who were rabid Mormon-haters. Joshua cared no more for their religious twaddle than he did for the Mormons’, but he knew they could be useful, lending an air of respectability to the mobbings and stiffening the will of the Missourians by filling them with a towering sense of self-righteousness.
For the first few minutes it was all bombast and braggadocio. Woods reminded them of their victory as the men shouted and cheered him on. Joshua smiled grimly. He knew the technique well. It took a while to get a group of men with limited courage to the point where they were convinced they were invincible.
But then the reverend began to talk about the job not being finished. The Mormons were gone from DeWitt, sure enough, but they were only gone back up to Caldwell and Daviess counties. And the good people of that part of the state were being terrorized by the depredations of the Mormons. It was time for the good men of Carroll County to ride north and put an end to the Mormon scourge once and for all.
That sobered the men somewhat, and Joshua sensed there was some hesitation. But the parson had preached more than one sermon to a shaky audience and knew where the heart of his congregation lay.
“Brethren,” he shouted, “you know what time of year it is?”
Several heads came up. What did the calendar have to do with anything?
“I’ll tell you what time of year it is,” he answered. “Before long it’s gonna be land sales time. Do you hear me, men? Land sales time. Do you know what that means?”
Even Joshua was a little puzzled by this sudden turn of the speech. But again the Reverend Mr. Woods answered his own question.
“You ever heard of preemption? A man farms a piece of ground, it’s his. But if he should leave it for any reason, the land gets preempted and sold in the land sales.”
Now they had it, and Joshua did too. A murmur of excitement swept through the crowd.
“Now, we know the Mormons are horse thieves and lowlifes of every kind,” Woods continued, “but they do have some mighty purty farmland up there. Mighty purty. If we were to go up and help our good brothers in Daviess County drive them Mormons clear out of the state, you know what would happen next?”
“Their land would be preempted!” someone shouted.
“Amen, brother! You got that exactly right. Now, the old settlers up north are gonna drive them Mormons out, with us or without us. We don’t get ourselves up there, they’re gonna be havin’ that land all to themselves.”
“I heard the old settlers agreed to sell out to the Mormons,” another man called.
The reverend swung on him, smiling as if he were real pleased. “Thank you, John. That’s exactly right.” He paused, and then a wolfish grin stole across his face. “And when the Daviess County boys drive the Mormons out of the state, they’ll have that land back
and
the money they was paid for it.”
Laughter and applause swept through the group.
“Now, do you want to be part of that or not?” Woods shouted, suddenly angry. “Do you want them boys to have it all to themselves?”
“No!”
Woods let his voice drop to a conspiratorial whisper, but made sure it was loud enough to carry to the back of the crowd. “And you know what else? We here in DeWitt know something those boys up there don’t know yet, don’t we?”
“What’s that, Reverend?”
“We know the government ain’t gonna be botherin’ us none while we drive those Mormons out of here. Now, don’t we know that for a fact?”
As the crowd began to whoop, his voice rose to a shout. “You heard Governor Boggs. He said it’s between us and the Mormons. ‘Let them fight it out,’ he said.”
Now the roar was like a howl of triumph.
“So what do you say, boys? Do we ride north or not?”
As the crowd exploded, Joshua turned and walked swiftly to his horse. It was a long ride back to Richmond, and he was going to have to push his horse hard to make it before midnight.
* * *
General Atchison was never at his best early in the morning, tending to grumpiness until he had a couple of cups of coffee and an hour out of the bed. This morning he had had neither, and he was like a rumpled old bear who had been kicked out of his den too early in the spring. “What time did you get back, Steed?” he grumbled.
“About one-thirty, sir.”
“And? What is the situation in DeWitt?”
Joshua gave him his report quickly. “I assume they’re on their way north by now,” he said as he finished.
Atchison swore. “Just what we need is another four or five hundred hotheaded idiots riding around up there with guns in their hands and greed in their hearts.”
“And their bellies full of whiskey,” Joshua added dryly. “But it’s more than that, sir.” He shook his head. His trip back had been delayed when he heard another rumor passing through a town west of DeWitt. “The name Cornelius Gilliam mean anything to you?”
Atchison’s eyes narrowed. “Neil Gilliam? Of course. Is he in on this too?”
Joshua nodded wearily. “Gilliam is raising a group of men from Platte and Clinton counties. They’re joining Parson Woods somewhere north of here.” Joshua knew Gilliam well. When the Mormons had come from Ohio in 1834 in what they called Zion’s Camp, Gilliam had led a party of men to the Fishing River to intercept them. Joshua had been with him. They were filled with hard liquor and empty boasts. And then a storm had hit their camp. It still gave Joshua the creeps when he remembered it. He had never seen anything to match the likes of that, not before, not since. The Missourians had been scattered, and the Mormons attributed it to divine intervention. He looked at Atchison. “Near as I can tell, they’ll have about eight hundred men, all told.”
Atchison swore again, this time bitterly. And then the qualities that made him a natural selection to be a general officer in the militia took over. He yelled for the man who served as his personal aide, and dictated a quick letter to Governor Boggs. He turned to Joshua. “I want you to take this personally to Governor Boggs in Jefferson City. Tell him the situation is deteriorating rapidly.” His voice was suddenly sarcastic. “See if you can’t persuade him to get His Excellency’s royal body up here and evaluate the situation before this turns into all-out warfare.”
“Yes, sir.”
“On your way out of town, get General Doniphan over here too. We’d better have a war council.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you get yourself back here in a hurry, Captain. We may be headed north too.”
Joshua kept his face impassive. “Yes, sir.” He turned and started out, but at the door he stopped. “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Independence is only a little bit out of the way, sir. I haven’t seen my family in almost a month now. Tomorrow is Sunday. Would you mind if I swung by there on my way back, just to see if everything’s all right with them, sir?”
Atchison started to shake his head, then changed his mind. “Why not?” he growled. “One more day isn’t going to see the end of this.” He nodded now. “Permission granted. But don’t dally, Steed. A short visit, then right back here. We’ve got things to do.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” And Joshua was out the door, feeling a deep sense of foreboding as he tucked into his pocket the letters he had been given and strode out of the building.
* * *
By mid-October, Far West was like a burlap bag filled with too many potatoes. The fabric was stretched to the limit and the seams were starting to unravel. In addition to the refugees pouring in from the countryside now—up to thirty teams a day were coming—the city had had to absorb the five hundred of the Kirtland Camp and then another two hundred of the weak and starving who had survived the siege of DeWitt.
With the brethren spending half their time running here and there to protect themselves, any building of new homes had virtually ceased. Less than thirty homes had been built since the beginning of September, and in that same time the population had swelled by three or four hundred families. Families now were housed in rooms rather than individual residences. Extended families like the Steeds, where parents and married children lived in separate homes, moved in together and turned their vacant homes over to the newcomers. Nathan and Lydia and their children were now living with Benjamin and Mary Ann and Matthew. Two young families shared Nathan and Lydia’s one-room cabin. But even that was not sufficient. Every vacant lot was jammed with wagons, tents, crate shacks, and open campfires.
Even before the troubles had started, the infrastructures of Far West had been taxed to the limit. In just over two years the site had gone from being a desolate, windswept ridge on the prairie to a city of nearly five thousand people. And now that population was up by another fifteen hundred or more. Even in the best of circumstances it would have been a logistical nightmare, but with civil war threatening to engulf the countryside the movement of goods and services into Caldwell County virtually came to a standstill.
“Provisions are low,” wrote one man in his journal, phonetically spelling some words as best he could. “Here corn is 20 cts per bushel, beans 1.00, wheat 87 1/2 cents. Wood is $2.00 per cord. Soap is the hardest necessary to be got. Bar soap is worth 18 3/4 per pound, soft soap is from 7 to 10 cents per pound which is about 1.00 per gallon. Salt is 12 1/2 cts per quart. Milk is nothing but is getting rather skirse. Pumpkins and squash are quite low. Verry little of domestic fruit is raised within 20 miles. Medical herbs are reather scirce. Bring on Lobelia, Babary Rasbury, slipery Elm, Composition, bitters, & Hot drops. Peneroyal is plenty. Clothing is twice as high hear as at the East, shoes also. 3 Months since 1 per cent would insure goods from St Louis to this place but now is thought worth 25 per cent. Indeed perilous times have verily come, and it is at the Risk of our lives that we go to the landing for our goods.”
With his characteristic flair for practicality, Joseph decided to capitalize on the already existing Mormon militia. The brethren had been organized into “companies” of tens and fifties and hundreds, which were quickly dubbed the “armies of Israel.” Some of the companies were given assignments that were of a military nature. One was asked to monitor the movement of the mobs and any opposing militia. Another set up a runner system to deliver messages quickly between Far West and Di-Ahman or among the scattered settlements. And in case of open warfare, the companies would provide defense for the city.
But the vast majority of these companies were given the task of helping the Saints to better prepare for whatever eventualities were coming. One of Joseph’s favorite scriptures came from the book of James. “ ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father,’ ” he was fond of quoting, “ ‘is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ ”
With the flood of incoming refugees there were many poor and not a few widows trying to survive with their children. And while the situation was becoming more and more desperate in Far West, Joseph was not one to sit about and wring his hands. So the “army of Israel” was put to work. One company was assigned to build cabins for those without shelter. Another was sent to help get in the crops. Cutting wood, fixing wagons, mending fences, stockpiling bedding and clothing—wherever there was a task or need that was too much for an individual family alone to do, Joseph sent one of the companies to help. Widows were specifically targeted, and the “army” was told to make sure these widows had sufficient shelter and food for the winter.