Independence, in Jackson County, Missouri, occupies two sharply contrasting places in the history recounted here: it was near the sacred center that Joseph Smith designated for the gathering of the Saints, and it became a focal point of the hostility that drove them from the county. The city’s significance is therefore not only geographical. It is where a religious claim to a promised homeland collided with the fears and resistance of established residents, and where, years later, an attempted killing of former governor Lilburn Boggs brought prophecy, political enmity, and suspected Mormon violence together again.

A promised gathering place

In the summer of 1831, Joseph Smith taught that Missouri—not Kirtland, where the Saints had settled after leaving New York—was the land appointed for their gathering. Jackson County, near the nineteenth-century city of Independence, was described as a holy place: the Garden of Eden, according to the revelation, had been there rather than in the Middle East. The same teaching placed the anticipated return of Jesus Christ in this region before the end of the century. Joseph directed his followers to assemble in the county and begin building a New Jerusalem; Saints continued arriving in growing numbers through 1838.

That religious geography gave settlement a meaning beyond acquiring homes or farmland. The Saints understood northwestern Missouri as an inheritance assigned by God, and Independence stood close to the center of that claim. To people already living in the county, however, the arrival of an increasingly numerous community asserting divine entitlement to the same land could look like a threat to their own standing and control. The town’s later history is shaped by this divergence: what one group regarded as sacred destination, its neighbors could experience as an attempt to remake the region around a new political and religious order.

Settlement and escalating hostility

The conflict was not reducible to religious difference alone. Many Mormon immigrants came from northeastern states and favored abolition, while many Missourians had southern roots and some held enslaved people. Local residents were also alarmed by the Saints’ close-knit social and economic life. The Mormons bought extensive tracts through church funds, preferred to trade with fellow Saints, and voted as a bloc in accordance with Joseph’s directives. As their numbers grew, non-Mormon residents feared that the community might take control of regional politics and public institutions.

These fears developed alongside the Saints’ own conviction that they were God’s chosen people and had a divinely granted right to establish Zion in the county. Joseph’s teachings divided the world into those aligned with the Lord and those opposed to him; a revelation called the land of Missouri the Saints’ inheritance even as it was, in the same passage, the land of their enemies. Such language intensified local apprehension. A warning published in a Fayette newspaper in 1833 expressed the political anxiety plainly: residents feared that, as Mormon numbers increased, county officials would eventually be Mormons too.

At first, Jackson County residents held meetings, passed anti-Mormon resolutions, and called on civil authorities to intervene. When those efforts did not stop the influx, citizens of Independence took action themselves. In July 1833, an armed mob of five hundred Missourians tarred and feathered two Latter-day Saints and destroyed a printing office after an LDS newspaper published an article considered too sympathetic to abolition. Three days later, the mob forced nine Mormon leaders, under threat of death, to promise they would leave within a year. Attacks continued that autumn: ten homes were razed, one Saint was killed, and other residents were stoned.

The expulsion culminated in a coordinated night of terror across Mormon settlements in the region. After beating the men, vigilantes drove about twelve hundred Saints from their homes into the cold darkness. Most fled north across the Missouri River and did not return to Jackson County. The narrative presents Independence not as the sole setting of every assault, but as the town from which local resistance became organized violence, and as the nearby urban landmark for a larger forced removal.

Boggs and the attempted assassination

The conflict’s association with Independence returned in 1842, when Boggs was living in the city after serving as Missouri’s governor. On the evening of May 6, a gunman outside his home fired through a window while Boggs read a newspaper in his study. He was struck four times and was widely expected to die; newspapers across the country reported his apparent death and speculated that a Mormon had tried to fulfill Joseph Smith’s earlier prophecy that Boggs would die by violent hands within a year.

The weapon was found outside the study, tossed into a puddle. Investigators traced the pistol to a local store, where it had recently been stolen. The storekeeper’s account pointed toward a hired hand associated with Ward, identified as Porter Rockwell, an accomplished horseman from Nauvoo who had arrived in Independence a couple of months before the shooting and left town immediately afterward. Boggs survived his severe injuries, so the reports of his death proved premature. The book treats Rockwell as almost certainly the would-be assassin, but neither he nor another Saint was brought to justice for the attack.

The city’s divided significance

These episodes give Independence a significance built from proximity and recurrence. In the 1830s, it was near the sacred landscape where Joseph Smith directed the Saints to gather, while its existing residents saw the settlers’ land claims, political unity, and growth as a threat. The resulting violence ended the community’s first attempt to establish itself in Jackson County. In 1842, the city was again linked to the consequences of the earlier struggle: Boggs, a central opponent of the Saints, was attacked at home after Joseph’s prophecy had circulated among both Mormons and their critics.

The book’s account thus sets two kinds of power against one another without making them identical. The revelation that marked the region as holy helped motivate settlement; local fears and armed action helped drive that settlement away. Later, prophetic language about Boggs’s death supplied a frame through which the shooting was interpreted, while the suspected gunman escaped accountability. Independence becomes more than a point on a map: it is a recurring boundary between religious promises, political conflict, and violence whose authorship and meaning remain contested.