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Latter-Day Saint Conflict in Clay County
Max H Parkin
The Latter-day Saint experience in Clay County, Missouri, in 1833-36 is a link in the chain of conflicts which people suffered in early Missouri. While it is a less familiar link, the distress of the Latter-day Saints in Clay County was abundant and took several forms. It started with their untimely and hazardous crossing of the Missouri River into Clay County from their homes in neighboring Jackson County, where mob violence in November 1833 had forced them away in a confused and unprepared state. This disorderly departure contributed to an uncomfortable survival of the Saints in Clay County and elsewhere, particularly during the first winter of exile. Then, defeat and frustration-coming from many failed efforts to return to Jackson County or to gain redress, and later hostile treatment from their new neighbors-were other hapless phases in that distress.
Survival
Their early hardships in Clay County were lamentable. At the forced river crossing from Jackson County, the fearful and sometimes confused Saints suffered from the lack of supplies and other preparations. Some of the suffering, however, could have been avoided if the Saints had met the unlawful demands of the Jackson mob, for after the mobs attacked them in Jackson County in July 1833, their enemy provided them sufficient time to harvest their crops and take provisions with them. Instead, the Saints accepted a suggestion from Missouri's governor to seek protection in the courts and hire attorneys to help. When the mobs learned of it, they forcefully evicted them, unprepared, with beatings and frightful threats of worse horrors if they did not leave. Of their unready condition and abrupt expulsion, Eliza, the young daughter of Bishop Edward Partridge, ecclesiastical leader of the Latter-day Saints in Jackson County, lamented, "A great amount if not all of our provisions that we had laid up for the winter must be lost and our houses left with many of our things in them, our lands and orchards and improvements of every kind left to the benefit [of] those who have driven us away."
As the first Latter-day Saints crossed the Missouri River northward on 7 November 1833 into Clay County from the ferry landing at Independence, Bishop Partridge, his family and others spent a fearful night in the heavy rain and cold. Others would cross the river at ferry stations elsewhere-east and west-or at other places on their own for the next several days. In fact, during that inclement November about a thousand expatriates set up housekeeping randomly for miles along the Missouri River-bottoms in Clay County, and a few hundred escaped south to Van Buren or to counties to the east. On the day he crossed the river, Nathan Tanner Porter observed that "the banks of the Missouri was now being lined with campfires of the little suffering multitude."