The Suffering of Zion - Part 1

In 1830, Joseph Smith and five followers founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints near Palmyra, New York.  Smith had built the church from nothing, dispatched missionaries throughout America and into Europe and gathered thousands to worship God and build Zion in the New World.

In Nauvoo, Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi River, the church turned a swamp land into one of the state's most populous and prosperous cities of the 1830s.  The "Saints" as they called themselves created an ideal society where no one went hungry or barefoot, where no one was illiterate or a prisoner.  That success made them a target for outsiders who were called "Gentiles" by the church.  The church claimed God favored them over the non-Mormons.  They lived in communal type of groups and they were strongly anti-slavery.  All of these roused bitter hatred of the people they lived around them. 

In Missouri, they were tarred and feathered, threatened with castration and generally harassed.  In 1838 the governor of Missouri called out the militia against them asserting that "they must be treated like enemies and exterminated or driven out of the state."  The church went back to Illinois where Smith drafted a charter establishing an independent theocracy in Nauvoo.  On June 24, 1844, Smith conferred for the last time with followers - by nightfall he and six others had turned themselves over to authorities to avoid the local mob's threat of mass slaughter.  Smith's charges were treason.

Next time...Polygamy?

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Today in Pioneer History:  "On May 22, 1843, a massive wagon train, made up of 1,000 settlers and 1,000 head of cattle, sets off down the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri. Known as the "Great Emigration," the expedition came two years after the first modest party of settlers made the long, overland journey to Oregon.