“Nits will make lice”

“Nits will make lice” is the phrase William Reynolds used to justify killing ten-year-old Sardius Smith during the Haun’s Mill Massacre. Reported by Sardius’s younger brother, the saying turns a child into a supposed future enemy and exposes the logic by which the attackers made extermination seem permissible.

The Phrase at Haun’s Mill

After Missouri Militia troops fired on the settlement, Sardius took refuge in the blacksmith shop with other Mormon men and boys. When the Missourians entered, they found him cowering beneath the bellows. Sardius begged for his life; one of the attackers reportedly urged Reynolds not to shoot him because he was so young. Reynolds answered with the phrase and then shot the boy in the head.

The account comes from Sardius’s younger brother, who had been shot through the hip and survived by feigning death beneath the bodies. The phrase therefore reaches the reader through a survivor’s report of the exchange, not as a general maxim detached from the scene. Its immediate consequence was the killing of a child who had already surrendered himself to the attackers’ mercy.

Meaning and Function

The image of nits becoming lice collapses the distinction between a child and an adult enemy. Sardius is treated not as a frightened boy in need of protection but as a future danger whose imagined growth is offered as a reason to kill him in the present. The phrase’s chilling force lies in that conversion: a prediction stands in for evidence, while the child’s plea and youth are explicitly dismissed.

In the narrative, the words expose the moral logic behind the violence at Haun’s Mill rather than soften it. Reynolds’s explanation does not describe an act of self-defense; it makes the annihilation of Mormon children part of the stated rationale. The phrase thus condenses the massacre’s dehumanizing logic into a single sentence, followed immediately by the killing it is meant to excuse.

Place in the Massacre’s Aftermath

Eighteen Saints were killed in and around the blacksmith shop, and the massacre became part of Latter-day Saints’ collective memory. The reported saying gives that broader violence a particularly stark human focus: it links the deaths to an expressed willingness to treat even children as targets. More than 160 years later, the book says, Mormons still spoke of the massacre with indignation and undiminished rage; the phrase remains inseparable from the story of Sardius Smith’s death.