Lilburn Boggs

Lilburn Boggs appears in the book as a Missouri governor whose conflict with the Latter-day Saints became a contest over state power, religious survival, and prophetic authority. His 1838 order directing that the Saints be treated as enemies and driven from Missouri, if necessary, preceded the attack on Haun's Mill. Years later, after Joseph Smith predicted that Boggs would die by violence within a year, Boggs was shot in his Independence home. He survived, but the attack linked the earlier political conflict to a new question: whether violence could be understood as the fulfillment of a prophet’s words.

Governor and the Missouri Conflict

Boggs had won the 1836 gubernatorial election on an anti-Mormon platform. The book places his decisive action in the escalating violence of 1838. After Joseph Smith’s forceful call to arms, Latter-day Saints raided non-Mormon towns and took food, livestock, and valuables; about fifty non-Mormon homes were burned. Missourians retaliated, destroying Mormon cabins. A skirmish eleven days after Smith’s speech left three Saints and one non-Mormon dead.

The account stresses that the report reaching Boggs distorted the scale of that violence. An inflammatory letter falsely claimed that the Saints had killed fifty Missourians. Boggs responded by issuing an order to the senior general of the Missouri Militia: the Mormons were to be treated as enemies and exterminated or driven from the state if that was necessary to preserve public peace. His order transformed a report—already false in its central claim—into official policy against the Mormon population.

Days later, three companies of militia under Colonel Thomas Jennings attacked the settlement at Haun's Mill. The narrative identifies the attack as an immediate consequence of the order’s issuance, rather than presenting Boggs as a participant on the scene. The distinction matters: his role was that of the governor who authorized a coercive state response, while the troops carried it out at the settlement. The book situates the episode within a cycle of attacks and retaliation, but the gubernatorial command gave that cycle the force of state authority.

Arrest, Release, and Prophecy

Boggs remained Joseph Smith’s political nemesis after the Latter-day Saints were driven from Missouri. Smith escaped from jail but still faced criminal charges there, a possible extradition, and a bounty. In May 1841, a Missouri sheriff’s posse surprised and arrested him outside Nauvoo. Smith was nearly taken across the state line before securing his release through a writ of habeas corpus.

Soon afterward, Smith publicly predicted that Boggs would die by violent hands within a year. The book presents this statement in the context of Smith’s anger over the arrest and continuing harassment. It does not establish that Smith ordered an attack, or that he knew in advance how the prediction might be acted upon. Instead, it draws attention to the dangerous ambiguity created when a prophetic declaration about a political enemy could be treated by believers as an obligation to help bring about its fulfillment.

The Shooting in Independence

On the evening of May 6, 1842, Boggs was reading a newspaper in the study of his Independence home when a gunman outside shot him through a window. He was hit four times and suffered severe injuries. Reports that he had died circulated widely, and newspapers speculated that a Mormon had attacked him to fulfill Smith’s prophecy.

Investigators found the handgun outside the study, discarded in a puddle, and traced it to a local store, where it had recently been stolen. The storekeeper identified a customer who had inspected the weapon shortly before it went missing: Porter Rockwell, a skilled horseman from Nauvoo. Rockwell had arrived in Independence a couple of months before the shooting and slipped out of town afterward. The account judges that he was almost certainly the would-be assassin, but that conclusion is presented as a strong inference, not a conviction or confession.

Boggs did not die. His recovery made the widely reported death premature, even as the evidence pointed toward Rockwell as the likely gunman. Neither Rockwell nor any other Latter-day Saint was brought to justice for the attack. The book leaves the criminal case unresolved while making the shooting’s political and religious meanings central to Boggs’s place in the narrative.

Significance and Afterlife

Boggs’s story turns on an unsettling contrast: a governor who had ordered the expulsion or possible extermination of a religious community later became the target of an attack associated with that community’s prophetic language. The narrative does not erase the earlier violence by foregrounding the shooting, nor does it treat Smith’s prediction as proof that he directed the assault. It keeps the distinction between prophecy, suspected action, and established fact visible.

For the Latter-day Saints, the attack on their former adversary could be interpreted as the apparent fulfillment of Smith’s prediction, even though Boggs lived. For the reader, its significance is less a simple tale of prediction fulfilled than a demonstration of how political conflict and religious claims could reinforce one another: a public prophecy gave a suspected act of violence an interpretive frame, while the absence of a prosecution left responsibility formally unsettled. Boggs is therefore both an agent of state persecution in the 1838 conflict and the surviving subject of an attempted killing whose likely perpetrator escaped justice.