New Mexico Historical Review Volume 42 Number 3 Article 2 7-1-1967 Diary of the Mormon Battalion Mission John D. Lee Juanita Brooks Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr Recommended Citation Lee, John D. and Juanita Brooks. "Diary of the Mormon Battalion Mission." New Mexico Historical Review 42, 3 (1967). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol42/iss3/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Mexico Historical Review by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. 165 DIARY OF THE MORMON BATTALI ON MISSION JOHN D. LEE edited by Juanita Brooks* INTRODUCTION THE CHURCH of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized on April 6, r83o, at Palmyra, in western New York. It grew rapidly, and in line with the general western movement, its members set up a center at Kirtland, Ohio, only to go on later to Independence, Jackson County, Missouri. Here they planned to make permanent headquarters, but soon such difficulties arose between them and the earlier citizens that the Mormons were driven north into Clay and then to Caldwell County. Here they were almost the first to settle; here they determined to defend their rights and to pay in kind some of the treatment they had received. This quickly brought a condition of chaos bordering on civil war, so that the governor called out the militia and issued an order to the effect that "the Mormons must be exterminated or driven from the state." The immediate reaction was an attack upon a small Mormon settlement at Haun's Mill, where seventeen people were killed and their bodies thrown into an empty well.