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Introduction

Late in the afternoon of 27 June 1844 in the obscure town of Carthage in southwest Illinois, Joseph Smith Jr., founding prophet and President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his loyal brother Hyrum were martyred by assassins' gunfire. Their road from Palmyra, New York, through Kirtland, Ohio, and Independence, Missouri, to Nauvoo, Illinois, had finally brought them to this inglorious end. Many concluded it was also the end of Mormonism.

So thought at least one Boston reader upon first learning of the Carthage carnage. "There is a report that Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet, and his brother, have been murdered while in gaol under the protection of the Governor of the State, by a band of ruffians. . . . Gov. [Thomas S.] Ford, with his 60 men, has retired to Quincy, to give his orders to the surrounding counties to muster their forces. Warsaw, Carthage, Augusta and even Hannibal are in fear and commotion. So much for Mormonism!!!"1

Such sentiments were not, however, universally shared. Some other observers, such as the editor of the New York Tribune, though critical of the Latter-day Saint's beliefs and practices, predicted their survival and future progress. "What will become of Mormonism now?" he queried.

Joseph Smith is dead-probably butchered in cold blood while a secure prisoner, and without the power, even if he had the will, to Brigham Young offer provocation for violence, but Mormonism has not died with him. Gross and monstrous as the delusions and perhaps abominations practiced in the name of that faith, yet it is a vital, living thing. Men and women, made of the same flesh and blood, and actuated by similar sensations and passions as Protestants, Catholics, Mahometans, or whatever creed or worship the sun shines upon, do actually believe in this Mormonism; are content to live and die by it; to yield up worldly wealth, domestic ties and the strong bonds of native land for it, and thus feeling and thus believing, to their dimmed and distorted spiritual vision, Joe Smith is as much the martyr hero as any whose shadow has ever fallen upon the world.2

Yet if Mormonism was to survive, it would have to pay an even heavier price than the loss of its founder-a toll measured in the suffering and death of hundreds of Latter-day Saints soon to be driven out of Nauvoo, their City of Joseph, in quest of some new home far away in the West.

Sixteen months passed between that forlorn afternoon in Carthage in 1844 and the fateful day in Nauvoo in early February 1846 when Brigham Young, the 44-year-old interim leader of the Church by right of his position as senior member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, began leading his people on a perilous pilgrimage westward across the Mississippi River. Threatened, persecuted, and ultimately driven by armed and angry men, "Brother Brigham," as he was commonly called, knew that for the salvation of the Church the only way left was out: rather die in the wilderness than be slaughtered in the streets of their own city.