The Last Days in Nauvoo - Part 3

When Joseph Smith entered the Carthage, Illinois jail in June of 1844, he said he had a premonition of doom.  For three days he and his brother Hyrum listened to the angry mob of anti-Mormons outside the jail.  Finally on the afternoon of June 27, the mob with painted black faces stormed the jail brandishing guns, killing Hyrum on the spot.  Smith seeing his brother fall to floor reportedly yelled, "O Lord, my God" as he was shot, falling through the window to the ground below.

Smith's martyrdom, however, could not heal the division in the church.  Soon after his was buried in a secret grave, Nauvoo's 20,000 Mormons blamed him and his advisors for the situation they found themselves in.  They denounced his alleged  practice of polygamy (which was never proved by the way) as the source of all the danger they found themselves in.  They looked at the rising anti-Mormon feeling that surrounded them in fear and trepidation.



No one knew who the next prophet would be to lead the church.  The "Senior Apostle", Brigham Young had competition.  Sidney Rigdon, one of the earliest members of the church and a close counselor of Smith, claimed a divine revelation had chosen him to be the next prophet.  A mass meeting was held on August 6, almost 2 months after Smith's death, and Rigdon was rejected. 



The new prophet would be Brigham Young, a plain spoken Vermont native who decided the church's survival depended  on abandoning Nauvoo.  Young proposed a modern day Exodus to the West but he didn't know where...yet. 






Next time...1400 miles to the West.
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On This Day in Pioneer History:  "On June 8, 1874, Apache Chief Cochise, one of the great leaders of the Apache Indians in their battles with the white man dies of probably stomach cancer on the Chiricahua reservation in southeastern Arizona.