City of Zion

City of Zion was Joseph Smith’s name for the sacred center he commanded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to establish at Independence. The phrase made a specific place carry a religious promise and a territorial claim; in the contested landscape of Jackson County, Missouri, those meanings quickly became entangled with questions of settlement, power, and belonging.

Meaning and Declaration

In 1833, Smith proclaimed Jackson County holy land and commanded that Independence become the Church’s City of Zion. The name expressed more than the hope of building a religious community: it placed the town at the center of a sacred geography and asserted that the surrounding region belonged to the community’s future. The book presents this declaration as an especially ominous development in the eyes of local opponents, who feared the growing settlement’s influence over the county.

A Settlement on Contested Ground

Members of the Church had begun arriving in 1831, only a few years after Independence was founded. At first, local residents regarded the small advance party as harmless; then more arrived, bought land, established a settlement and a ferry crossing on Blue River, opened a general store in Independence, and founded the town’s first newspaper. Some spoke against slavery, while their religious beliefs and identification with Indigenous peoples across the Kansas border further marked them as outsiders in the eyes of established residents.

By the summer of 1833, the Church’s membership in the county exceeded a thousand, about a third of the population. Its growth made the City of Zion declaration a matter of local political alarm as well as religious aspiration: opponents believed the new arrivals might control the fall elections. A mass meeting at the courthouse produced angry speeches and a proclamation that the Church’s members were no longer welcome.

From Sacred Claim to Expulsion

Violence followed. A mob destroyed the Church’s printing press, and a bishop was tarred and feathered. On Halloween night, armed riders attacked the settlement on Blue River, drove women and children from their homes, burned crops and barns, and flogged men in the fields. Three people were killed in another clash. The book describes the county as caught in a state of dreadful agitation, with the City of Zion dispute unfolding amid attacks on the community and its homes.

After a spectacular meteor shower on November 12, some residents treated the spectacle as a sign that the Church should be driven from the region. More than a thousand people were forced across the Missouri River into less settled territory to the north, where persecution continued and the displaced community fought back. Missouri governor Lilburn W. Boggs called out the militia and declared that the Church’s members must leave the state or be exterminated. The conflict ended only when they departed for Illinois in 1839.

The Phrase’s Historical Force

City of Zion gives the settlement’s conflict its defining tension: for the Church, Independence was to become a holy center; for its opponents, the growing community represented a threat to local control. The sacred name therefore did not remain an abstract religious ideal. It was attached to land, settlement, public influence, and a town whose existing residents were already contesting who could claim the region. The resulting violence and expulsion reveal how sharply a religious vision of place could collide with the political and social boundaries imposed by its neighbors.