Missouri was both a promised homeland and the scene of a violent rupture in early Latter-day Saint history. Joseph Smith’s revelations directed his followers toward the state as a sacred gathering place, but their rapid growth and distinct communal ambitions sharpened conflict with established residents. By 1839, after assaults, military confrontation, and the forced surrender of their leaders, the Saints were leaving Missouri. The state remained in their memory as the place where their claims to a divinely appointed home collided with local hostility and state power.

A Promised Land and a Growing Community

Hostility toward Joseph Smith and his new religion in the Palmyra region prompted a revelation in December 1830 commanding the Saints to move to Ohio. In the summer of 1831, another revelation described Missouri as the appointed gathering place. The location’s religious importance was not incidental: Joseph taught that the Garden of Eden had been in Jackson County, near Independence, and that Christ would return there. He directed the Saints to assemble in the county and begin building a New Jerusalem. They arrived in increasing numbers, continuing to settle in northwestern Missouri through 1838. The newcomers brought more than a religious claim to the region. Many came from the Northeast and favored abolition, while many Missourians had Southern roots and owned enslaved people. Local residents also objected to the Saints’ close-knit social and economic life. The Mormons bought substantial tracts of land using church funds, preferred to trade with one another, and voted as a bloc in accordance with Joseph Smith’s direction. As their population expanded, Missourians feared that they would gain control of local politics. The resulting friction joined disputes about slavery and political influence to a deeper conflict over who had the right to define Missouri’s future.

Jackson County and the First Expulsion

In Jackson County, the Saints’ sense of divine entitlement intensified that conflict. Their religious understanding cast the land as an inheritance, even as it was already home to other communities. Residents of Independence initially held meetings, passed resolutions against the Mormons, and sought intervention by civil authorities. When these measures did not halt the migration, opposition turned to mob action. In July 1833, an armed group of about five hundred Missourians attacked two Latter-day Saints, destroyed a printing office over an antislavery article, and forced nine Mormon leaders to promise that the community would leave within a year. Later that autumn, attackers destroyed homes, killed one Saint, and assaulted others. In November, vigilantes drove roughly twelve hundred Saints from their settlements during a night of coordinated terror. Most fled north across the Missouri River and did not return to Jackson County. The expulsion did not end the Saints’ effort to establish themselves in Missouri. In 1836, the state legislature designated sparsely populated Caldwell County as a zone of Mormon settlement, hoping to reduce conflict by concentrating the community there. Many Saints moved into Caldwell from neighboring counties. By 1838, they had purchased about 250,000 acres from the federal government and built Far West. The arrangement initially seemed to ease tensions, but the community’s growth continued beyond Caldwell’s boundaries. In nearby Daviess County, new Mormon settlements renewed local fears and helped set the stage for a wider crisis.

The 1838 Conflict and Haun’s Mill

At Gallatin, the Daviess County seat, an election-day confrontation on August 6, 1838, brought hostility into the open. A Whig candidate denounced the Mormons, and another local man challenged their right to vote. The confrontation formed part of an escalating conflict between the Saints and their neighbors. Joseph Smith, after years of forbidding retaliation, delivered a forceful call to defend the community. Mormons then raided non-Mormon settlements for food, livestock, and other property, and approximately fifty homes were burned. Missourians responded by destroying Mormon cabins. A subsequent skirmish left three Saints and one non-Mormon dead. An inflammatory report to Governor Lilburn Boggs falsely claimed that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians. Boggs responded with an order directing the Missouri Militia to treat the Mormons as enemies and expel them from the state, using extermination if necessary. Days later, on October 30, 1838, militia companies under Colonel Thomas Jennings attacked the settlement at Haun’s Mill. Eighteen Saints were killed. The massacre became one of the defining events in the community’s memory of Missouri, and the book notes that Mormons continued to recall it with anger more than 160 years later. Joseph Smith was at Far West, sixteen miles away, while the attack occurred. The town was surrounded by a much larger Missouri force, and he learned of the massacre the following night. In the aftermath, he concluded that an all-out war would likely destroy him and his followers. He sent representatives to seek peace, but the terms imposed by the militia required the Saints to hand over Joseph Smith and other leaders, compensate Missourians for damaged property, surrender their weapons, and leave Missouri.

Surrender, Departure, and Enduring Memory

The Saints surrendered on November 1. Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum, and five other leaders were taken into custody, court-martialed, and found guilty of treason. General Alexander Doniphan refused an order to execute them, arguing that military authorities had no right to summarily kill civilians. His refusal spared Joseph Smith’s life at that moment, but it did not protect the wider community from the consequences of surrender. Disarmed Saints faced theft and destruction of property, beatings, reported sexual assaults, and a deadline to leave the state by the spring of 1839. During the winter, the community endured hunger and severe cold while Joseph Smith and other leaders remained jailed. On April 16, 1839, Joseph and nine fellow prisoners escaped and crossed into Illinois, where most of the Saints had already resettled. Missouri’s role in the story therefore extended beyond the physical departure: violence there became part of the community’s account of repeated persecution and its determination not to be driven away again. That memory was invoked years later, after the Saints had established themselves in Utah. As federal troops approached in 1857, church leaders recalled the killings and expulsions in Missouri and Illinois to rally resistance. The Missouri experience thus persisted as both a particular history of settlement and forced removal and a shared account through which later generations understood their vulnerability, solidarity, and loyalty to religious leadership.