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The Exodus From Kirtland

When Brigham Young described conditions existing in Kirtland on December 22, 1837, the day of his departure from that community, he said that he fled for his life because of the fury of the mob. After making hasty preparations for a journey of more than eight hundred miles, he left his wife and his three-year-old son and one-year-old twins, mounted his horse, and galloped southward. His flight was the beginning of a mass exodus from Geauga County. Between the end of December 1837 and the middle of July 1838, probably more than sixteen hundred members of the Kirtland branch migrated west, abandoning their homes and beginning a new colonizing adventure in the wilderness of western America.

Three weeks after the first Latter-day Saints left Kirtland because of the "mobocratic spirit prevailing in the bosoms of the apostates," Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and George W. Robinson (clerk and recorder of the Church and Sidney Rigdon's son-in-law) also fled. "Persecution became so violent," Lucy Mack Smith observed, that "Joseph regarded it as unsafe to remain any longer in Kirtland." Eliza R. Snow also testified that the Prophet "had to flee" Kirtland because his life was in danger.

Joseph Smith recorded in greater detail the circumstances that led to his flight from the community he had helped build. "A new year dawned upon the Church in Kirtland," he wrote, "in all the bitterness of the spirit of apostate mobocracy, which continued to rage and grew hotter and hotter, until Elder Rigdon and myself were obliged to flee from its deadly influence, as did the Apostles and Prophets of old." Quoting the Savior, the Prophet said that "when they persecute you in one city, flee to another." He and his companions rode from Kirtland on the night of January 12, 1838, "to escape mob violence."

Describing another form of persecution that he feared, the Prophet asserted that the "hellish designs" of his enemies were colored under the disguise of legal processes. Luke S. Johnson, a former apostle who had left the Church but was opposed to the intolerant acts of others, believed that had Joseph not left Geauga County, he would have been involved in another expensive lawsuit for illegal banking and possibly faced imprisonment. Learning that the sheriff was planning on arresting the Prophet, Johnson intervened and placed Joseph in his custody "on an execution for his person, in the absence of property to pay a judgment of $50." After settling the judgment, the Prophet left for Missouri.

Fleeing from disgruntled creditors, angry apostates, and civil authorities, Joseph and his companions rode southward under cover of darkness and arrived the next morning in New Portage, Norton Township, Medina County, about sixty miles from Kirtland. Three days later, after the Prophet's wife, Emma, and their children arrived in Norton, the group continued their journey in covered wagons. Though the weather was bitterly cold, the Prophet wrote that a mob, armed with pistols and guns, followed him for about two hundred miles. During the pursuit, his enemies once stayed in a home where the Saints were sleeping, with only a partition separating the Smith family from their pursuers. That night, the Smiths listened to "their oaths and imprecations, and threats" concerning actions they would take if they seized the Mormon leader. On other occasions members of the mob passed Joseph Smith and his family passing through small Ohio communities, but failed to recognize them.