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 Introduction “Persecution in the Most Odious Sense of the Word” Thomas M. Spencer Parley P. Pratt recalled that the Missouri wind during the winter of 18301831 blew“with a keenness that would almost take the skin off the face.”1 That winter was a particularly brutal one, called by pioneers in western Missouri the “Winter of the Deep Snow.” Contemporaries living in the region claimed that the snow“seems to have continued for days, unabated—a wonder, at first, then a terror, a benumbing horror as it became a menace to life of men and animals.”2 One can imagine Pratt, the famous Mormon leader and fiery orator , hoping the weather was not a portent of troubles to come in Missouri. Very soon after the birth of their faith, Mormon church members came to Missouri. According to a revelation received by Joseph Smith, Mormons asserted that a holy place, Zion, existed on the North American continent. Since Zion was to be, in the words of Smith,“on the borders of the Lamanites,”most Mormons thought Zion was in the far western part of the continent.It was the faithless Lamanites who were to blame for the end of the holy civilization described in the Book of Mormon. Still, Book of Mormon prophets had asserted that the gospel, as restored by Joseph Smith, would be carried to Lamanite descendants . Smith, Pratt, and most Mormon leaders maintained that western North American Indians were Lamanite descendants in the 1830s and 1840s. Joseph Smith and many prominent Mormon leaders argued it was important for the sect to do all it could to redeem the Lamanite descendants centuries after their sin led to the end of the once holy and perfect civilization. In the fall of 1830, less than a year after the church was founded, Joseph Smith had a revelation that he should send several missionaries, including the  Thomas M. Spencer aforementioned Pratt, Oliver Cowdery, Peter Whitmer, and Ziba Peterson, “unto the land of Missouri, unto the borders of the Lamanites.” After a harrowing trip of fifteen hundred miles through the inhospitable Midwest winter landscape, the Mormon missionaries arrived in Jackson County, Missouri, sometime in January 1831. Later during the summer of 1831, Joseph Smith would issue a revelation proclaiming that Independence, Missouri, a town on the very edge of the organized United States at the time, was the location of Zion and even suggested that the area to the north of Daviess County was the original location of the Garden of Eden. Since Jackson County originally included the present-day counties of Cass and Bates, the western “border of the Lamanites”was seventy miles long.3 After the revelation from Joseph used the name, Mormon leaders even began to refer to Independence as the “New Jerusalem.” Like the Puritans of two centuries earlier (the ancestors of many of the original Mormons), the Mormons of the 1830s were decidedly millennialist in their outlook. They believed that the millennium would happen in their lifetime. Mormons believed that only those gathered in Zion would escape the violence and bloodshed of the end-times. Unusually for millenarians at the time, Mormons had not set a time frame for the second coming. However, they had decided upon a particular place where Christ would return and his true followers would be safe: Independence, Missouri. After arriving in Independence in early 1831, two of the missionaries, Peterson and Whitmer, established themselves as tailors. The remaining missionaries went west across the Kansas River into Indian territory to meet with the Delaware and Shawnee tribes. Cowdery succeeded in convincing the Delaware chief, William Anderson, to promise he would build a house for the Mormon missionaries. Pratt would later claim that their successful visit made Indian agents and missionaries of other faiths envious. The reality was that the Mormon missionaries had not gotten the required federal permit to live in Indian territory. By the time Pratt returned to Kirtland, Ohio, in March 1831 to report on the activities of the missionaries, the church there had grown from a hundred to a thousand members during his absence.4 A small number of settlers moved to Jackson County during the spring and summer of 1831. Mormons began to buy large tracts of land in the county as early as July 1831. The Mormons also established the first newspaper in the county, the Evening and Morning Star, which published its first issue in June 1832. The newspaper, edited by William W. Phelps, was primarily concerned with...

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