Haun's Mill was a Mormon settlement in Missouri whose name became inseparable from the massacre carried out there on October 30, 1838. Three companies of the Missouri Militia attacked the community, killing eighteen Saints in and around its blacksmith shop. The place matters not only as the setting of a particular atrocity but as a turning point in the conflict: the news helped persuade Joseph Smith that open war would destroy his followers, while the massacre entered a collective memory of persecution that later leaders could invoke.

Settlement and Conflict

The violence at Haun's Mill grew out of the escalating confrontation between Mormon immigrants and their Missouri neighbors. Many Saints had come from the Northeast and favored abolition, while many Missourians had southern roots and owned enslaved people. The newcomers' separate commerce, coordinated voting, and conviction that they were God's chosen people with a divine claim to Zion deepened local fears and hostility. Their stark division of the world into those aligned with the Lord and those opposed to him further narrowed the ground for sympathy or compromise.

The massacre took place amid a wider breakdown of order. After raids and counterattacks, an inflammatory report falsely claimed that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians. Governor Lilburn Boggs responded by issuing an order that the Mormons be treated as enemies and, if necessary, driven from the state or exterminated. Haun's Mill was one of the settlements exposed to the consequences of that order and the armed conflict surrounding it.

The Attack

Late in the afternoon of October 30, three companies of the Missouri Militia, commanded by Colonel Thomas Jennings, appeared at the settlement. About twenty-five Mormon families had been working in the fields. Faced with a force of roughly 240 troops, the Mormon commander attempted to surrender, but the soldiers continued firing. Some residents fled to nearby thickets; three boys and fifteen men took shelter in the blacksmith shop, whose log walls had wide gaps. The attackers fired through the openings and then approached the building to shoot at close range.

Among those found in the shop was ten-year-old Sardius Smith, hiding beneath the bellows. He begged to be spared, but William Reynolds, one of the Missourians, killed him. Sardius's younger brother survived by remaining still beneath the dead. In all, eighteen Saints were killed in and around the shop. The killings of children as well as adults made the assault especially consequential in the community's account of what had happened there.

Joseph Smith and the Surrender

Joseph Smith was not at Haun's Mill during the attack. He was sixteen miles away, at Far West, overseeing the defense of a settlement surrounded by ten thousand Missouri troops. He learned of the massacre the following night and fell into a deep depression. Before the attack, he had moved between urging resistance and pursuing a peaceful settlement. Haun's Mill marked a change in that balance: he concluded that a full-scale war with the Missourians would end in the destruction of his people.

Joseph sent five men to negotiate for peace. The Missouri Militia's terms required the Saints to surrender Joseph and six other leaders to face treason charges, compensate Missourians for destroyed or plundered property, give up their weapons, and leave Missouri. Joseph accepted the demands, presenting his surrender to the faithful at Far West as a sacrifice intended to save their lives and the Church. The massacre therefore shaped events well beyond the settlement: it helped turn the immediate choice from armed resistance toward surrender and expulsion.

The aftermath remained severe. During the winter, the Saints faced famine and crippling cold, while Joseph and nine other Mormon leaders remained jailed on charges including treason and murder. In a letter from jail, Joseph joined the killings at Haun's Mill with Boggs's extermination order and the actions of the Missouri legislature in condemning the state. Reporting about the massacre in Missouri newspapers helped turn public opinion toward the Saints and prompted calls for an investigation. The prisoners escaped on April 16, 1839, after the sheriff guarding them had been bribed, got drunk, and fallen asleep; Joseph and his companions fled to rejoin Saints who had crossed into Illinois.

Memory and Significance

The massacre became a lasting part of Latter-day Saint collective memory. It stood alongside other trials endured in Missouri as evidence of suffering, but also as a test of faith and chosenness. The book's account emphasizes the double force of this memory: persecution could bind a threatened community together and sustain its identity, while repeated recollection could also intensify the boundary between the Saints and their enemies. Haun's Mill thus signifies both the human cost of the Missouri conflict and the way a community's remembered past can shape its understanding of belonging, danger, and survival.