Carthage, Illinois, is the setting of the imprisonment and killing of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith in June 1844. The town’s importance in the book rests on a sharp reversal: after Joseph returned to face prosecution rather than leave his followers, he and his brother were confined in a jail meant to protect them, but an armed militia overwhelmed that protection. The deaths in Carthage became a defining break in the history of the Latter-day Saints and, through John Taylor’s later leadership, a point of connection to the fundamentalist movement that figures in the book’s modern narrative.

The road to Carthage

Joseph and eleven others surrendered on June 24, 1844, after being charged with destroying a press. Their journey from Nauvoo to Carthage covered twenty-five miles, along roads lined with Illinois militiamen and other Gentiles who jeered at them. The route made the prisoners’ passage a public spectacle, exposing them to hostility before they reached the town and its jail.

The atmosphere in Carthage offered little reassurance. The streets were crowded with armed, inebriated, poorly disciplined members of several local militias, many demanding Joseph’s death. Governor Ford sought to protect Joseph and ensure a fair trial. He ordered the militias to disband, leaving a single company, the Carthage Greys, to guard the jail and its prisoners. That arrangement placed responsibility for their safety in the hands of a small local force amid a wider and openly hostile armed presence.

The jail and its prisoners

The Carthage jail was a two-story building of red limestone from a local quarry, with walls described as a yard thick. Its six rooms included two locked cells and four rooms used as living quarters by the jailer, his wife, and their seven children; one of the living spaces was a cramped attic garret. The building’s heavy walls and locked cells suggested security, but its limited rooms and domestic use also meant that imprisonment took place inside the jailer’s family home.

Ten of the accused men posted bail and were released. Joseph and Hyrum remained in custody because, in addition to the other charges, they faced treason charges. They were first held in the downstairs debtors’ cell, which was well lit and reasonably comfortable. The jailer, George Stigall, worried that its large windows at ground level left the brothers exposed to the angry crowd outside. He therefore allowed them to wait upstairs in his own bedroom, where friendly visitors could see them without restriction.

That access had an unintended consequence: two guns were smuggled into the jail, a six-shot pepperbox revolver and a single-shot pistol. On the afternoon of June 27, Joseph and Hyrum were receiving visits from John Taylor and Willard Richards when about 125 militiamen from the anti-Mormon town of Warsaw assembled outside. Although they had left Carthage earlier in deference to Ford’s order, they had not gone far. They returned with gunpowder rubbed on their faces as a disguise and attacked the jail.

The attack and its immediate aftermath

The assault killed Hyrum and Joseph. Joseph fired his revolver during the attack and then attempted to escape through a window; he fell to the ground and was declared dead by one of the militiamen. Taylor was seriously wounded while trying to get away from the gunfire and survived by taking cover beneath a bed. Richards, who had been caught unnoticed behind the door as it opened, emerged after the shooting stopped. He saw a crowd gathered around Joseph’s body below the window.

Taylor’s watch had stopped at 5:16:26 p.m. on June 27, 1844. The book identifies that precise time and date as a marker remembered by Latter-day Saints around the world. Joseph was thirty-eight. The watch supplies a small, exact measure of time against the scale of the event: a public journey, confinement in a local jail, and the sudden loss of the church’s prophet and his brother.

A turning point in the book’s history

Carthage’s significance extends beyond the deaths themselves because Taylor survived and later became the church’s third president and prophet, succeeding Brigham Young in 1877. Nine years afterward, he received a fiercely disputed revelation affirming plural marriage. The book traces consequences of that revelation into the modern fundamentalist movement, the settlement of Short Creek, and the life of Dan Lafferty. Carthage thus stands at the beginning of a chain of later religious and political disputes, although those developments unfold elsewhere and decades later.

The account also places the violence in Carthage beside the law that had brought Joseph and Hyrum there: charges over the destruction of a press, followed by treason charges that kept the brothers in jail after the others were freed on bail. The governor’s effort to provide a guard, Stigall’s attempt to move the prisoners away from vulnerable windows, and the visitors’ access to the upstairs room all show the fragile, contingent protections surrounding their custody. In the book’s wider narrative, Carthage is both a specific Illinois town and the setting of a succession crisis whose consequences continue to shape arguments about revelation, authority, and plural marriage.