In October of 1838, the governor of Missouri issued an executive order stating that all of the Mormons living in Missouri had to leave the state or be exterminated. There had been frictions between a rapidly growing Mormon population and the local Missourians over several years.
It boiled over in 1833 when the press of a Mormon-run newspaper was destroyed. The paper had run articles that seemed to invite free Black people to join the church and move to Missouri, and also seemed to be abolitionist in tone.
Destroy the press and you destroy the idea. That led to a few years of increasingly violent tit-for-tat, and finally the state’s extermination order.
I had a 3x great grandfather and grandmother who were on the receiving end of the extermination order. They were not killed, but their cabin and crops were burned at Haun’s Mill, and 17 members of a village of about 300 people were shot at point blank range. They took refuge in a windowless blacksmith shop, and the Missouri militia knocked the chinking out from between the logs and fired inside.
That was 30 years before the Civil War erupted at Fort Sumter. The events in Missouri were certainly the opening act. Missouri got around to rescinding the extermination order in 1976.
I take strange vacations, and this year’s bike/van trip through Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska was one of the stranger trips, and one of the more interesting. If your vacation doesn’t require some intensive reading and study beforehand, you’re doing it wrong. I really studied for this one, trying to make sense of it all. I couldn’t, but that maybe was the point.
In Independence, Missouri, there is a site revered by various Mormon branches (and there are many). It’s a vacant block of land where someday there will be a temple built on what some believe was both the Garden of Eden and the site of the Second Coming.
On one side of it, the Utah Mormon Church has a visitors center. Across the residential street there is a sort of Oz-like headquarters of a larger off-shoot now called the Community of Christ. A tiny sect called the Church of Christ Temple Lot owns the vacant lot they all regard as holy ground. They don’t much like each other.
I rode my bike around the empty lot a couple of times. An old man came out of the Temple Lot headquarters in an electric wheel chair. He was motoring along the sidewalk, and a woman working in her yard across the street was screaming at him that he was a devil worshiper and going to burn in hell. The old man returned similar sentiments.
I took a second lap around the block and they were still at it. I’m guessing it is a daily routine for these two. It also seemed like they were both missing the point of the whole thing, but what do I know? I haven’t been to church in 50 years and find increasing clarity with every year of absence.
Many of the sites we visited were huge patches of manicured lawns that were otherwise vacant. The tent cities and log cabins long ago rotted away. It turns out that there are about 600 people in the area called to lawn-mowing missions. Local church members are drafted to mow what must add up to a couple of square miles of lawn in the scattered historic sites. If they don’t mow, the forest would take over in a couple of years.
There were also missionaries drafted to manage teams of draft horses for wagon tours of the old Nauvoo townsite. I talked with one of them, and he said it was unclear where they were going to continue to find experienced teamsters who know how to care for and drive these huge draft horses. Nobody is teaching that in school.
They buy the horses and harness gear from the Amish in a nearby community. Maybe they will have to hire Amish teamsters to give tours to Mormons from Utah who want to see the vacant lot where an ancestor once lived.
Iowa is corn, except for the part that is beans. I’ve never seen agriculture on that scale. Combines with 40-foot headers were harvesting corn at about 20 miles an hour. The beans aren’t ready yet.
The local TV news begins with the farm report, then the weather. Nothing else matters.
People in Iowa watch the price of beans like we watch the snow depth in Jupiter Bowl. Corn is $3.84/bushel, down from $7.87 last year. Beans are $9.85, down from $16.85 a year ago. There were debates on whether it was worth the cost of the fuel to harvest them. China isn’t buying American beans this year. Nobody is happy.
The trip was fascinating, and parallels to where we are now were unsettling. Smashing printing presses to silence differing viewpoints was common then. Late night TV hosts are not so different. We haven’t quite got an extermination order, but the ICE raids and federalized National Guard troops around the country are at least rhyming it.
On my journey I learned a lot, but can’t help wondering if as a country we haven’t learned a damn thing.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.