On October 27, 1838, Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri issued an executive order stating that “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.” Later dubbed the Mormon Extermination Order by the Mormons, and less inflammatorily recalled as Executive Order Number 44 by historians, this command resulted in the eventual removal and exodus of much of the Missouri Mormon population from the state.
It all started in 1831 when Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, declared in a visionary statement that the land of Jackson County, Missouri was the “land of [their] inheritance” and that they should move their and receive the land currently held by settlers. Smith and his followers came in droves, which understandably upset the settlers already occupying the lands Smith was claiming by divine right. After just two years, the locals drove the Mormons out of Jackson County, and the Mormon group, growing larger and stronger as new converts arrived, appealed to the state for assistance. The state decided to create Caldwell County, which would be set aside specifically for Mormon settlement and would hopefully usher in peaceful coexistence of the religious group and other Missourians.
The peace didn’t last long. Mormons converts continued to arrive and failed to honor the agreed upon settlement patterns. While this increased tensions, it didn’t directly result in open conflict; that would come soon with the election of 1838. Given that many Mormons now lived in the state, and that they tended to use their votes in line with church doctrine, they became the most powerful political group around, essentially holding the power to control elections by entirely legal means. This led to fears of disenfranchisement by the earlier settlers (not unfounded fears at all), who decided to prevent Mormons from voting by gathering a mob in front of a polling place. This quickly devolved into violence when a group of Mormons showed up to vote and began brawling with the mob. This served as the spark of the 1838 Mormon War.
Calling it a war is a lofty appellation for something that was really a series of skirmishes and open but rarely deadly conflict. Mobs of Missourians began expelling Mormons from their homes at gunpoint and ordering them out of the state. A state militia was organized to put down the violence by disarming the Mormons, who had, in fairness, formed mobs of their own and committed their own acts of intimidation. With disarmament looming, a group of the more radical wing of the Mormons gathered and organized into military formation and marched on a group of the Missouri Militia. This battle of Crooked River would see one Missourian and two Mormons killed, and would serve as the impetus for Governor Boggs’ famous order number 44 to forcibly expel all Mormons from the state.
By the spring of 1839, over 10,000 Mormons had left Missouri. Church leaders appealed to the state legislature to overturn the order, but they were largely ignored. The group moved around, before settling en masse in Utah, which was largely unpeopled at the time. Small groups of Mormons returned to Missouri after the conflict settled down and without the earlier feeling of divine right to the land. Governor Boggs, after leaving the Governorship, survived an assassination attempt in his Missouri home and then decamped to the new state of California in what many saw as a bid to get away from the Mormons who probably wanted him dead. Technically speaking, the Missouri militia had a standing order to remove all Mormons from the state until the act was rescinded in 1976 by then Missouri Governor Christopher Bond. The whole episode is just another example of the many disputes and conflicts during western American expansion, but is particularly evocative given it was not a quarrel between two fringe groups or families, but a forced relocation program perpetrated by a state government on a religious group. It is not an episode worth glorifying, nor one we should forget.
