Then Samuel Smith suddenly became violently ill and died on 30 July 1844. This added suspicion of murder to the escalating drama. Council of Fifty member and physician John M Bernhisel told William Smith that anti-Mormons had somehow poisoned his brother. William learned from Samuel’s widow that Hosea Stout, a Missouri Danite and senior officer of Nauvoo’s police, had acted as his brother’s nurse. Stout had given him ‘white powder’ medicine daily until his death. Samuel became ill within days of the discussion of his succession right, and by 24 July was ‘very sick’. There had been enough talk about Samuel’s succession claims that the newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, reported: ‘A son of Joe Smith Senior it is said, had received the revelation that he was to be the successor of the prophet’.
William Smith eventually concluded that Apostle Willard Richards asked Stout to murder (his brother) Samuel H Smith. The motive was to prevent Samuel from becoming church president before Brigham Young and the full Quorum of Twelve arrived (in Nauvoo). William’s suspicions about Stout are believable since Brigham Young allowed William Clayton to go with the pioneer company to Utah three years later only because Stout threatened to murder Clayton as soon as the apostles left. Clayton regarded Hosea Stout as capable of homicide and recorded no attempt by Young to dispute that assessment concerning the former Danite. ibid.
We close the door on one side, and say that whoredoms, seductions and adulteries must not be committed among us, and we say to those who are determined to carry on such things: we will kill you. George Q Cannon, sermon 15th August 1869, cited Quinn at 256, 1997
I have good reason for believing that my brother Samuel H Smith, died of poison at Nauvoo, administered by order of Brigham Young and Willard Richards, only a few weeks subsequent to the unlawful murder of my other brothers, Joseph and Hiram Smith, while incarcerated in Carthage jail.
Several other persons who were presumed to stand between Brigham Young and the accomplishment of his ambitions and wicked designs, mysteriously disappeared from Nauvoo about the same time, and have never been heard from since. William Smith, letter to the New York Tribune 28th May 1857
Q) Have you had any knowledge of cases of poisoning in Nauvoo, ordered by the authorities?
A) I know that several men, six or seven, died under very suspicious circumstances. Among them were two secretaries of the prophet, Mulholland and Blaskel Thompson. I saw Mulholland die and the symptoms looked very suspicious to me. Dr Foster, who was a very good physician, believed firmly that those six or seven men had been poisoned, and told me so repeatedly. Dr William Law, interview Dr Wyl
In the history of any people there has never been recorded a case of such gross mismanagement as that of gathering the foreign Saints to Zion in the year 1856.
Until this disastrous year the emigrants had always made the journey across the plains with ox-teams ...
The cost of emigration in this way was from £10 to £12, English money, or nominally $50 to $60 in gold – not very expensive, surely, for a journey from Liverpool to Salt Lake City; but to Brigham, in one of his fits of economy, it seemed altogether too costly, and he set to work to devise some means for retrenchment. During the entire winter of 1855-56, he and his chief supporters were in almost constant consultation on the subject of reducing the expenses of emigration, and they finally hit upon the expedient of having them cross the plains with hand-carts, wheeling their own provisions and baggage, and so saving the expense of teams. The more Brigham thought of his plan, the more in love he grew with it, and he sent detailed instructions concerning it to the Apostle Franklin D Richards, the Mormon agent at Liverpool, who published it in the Millennial Star, as the new ‘divine plan’ revealed to Brother Brigham by the Lord, whose will it was that the journey should be made in this manner. Ann Eliza Webb 'Wife No 19' ch11 'Divine Emigration – The Prophet and the Handcart Scheme’
By the mid-1850s LDS Church leaders needed less expensive ways to move poor immigrants to Utah. The Perpetual Emigrating Fund that loaned to the needy was depleted, and costs for wagons and ox-teams were high. Therefore, Brigham Young announced on 29th October 1855 a handcart system by which the Church would provide carts to be pulled by hand across the Mormon Trail. As a result, between 1856 and 1860 nearly 3000 Latter-day Saint emigrants joined ten handcart companies – about 650 handcarts total – and walked to Utah from Iowa City, Iowa, (a distance of 1300 miles) or from Florence, Nebraska (1030 miles). History of Utah
Like despots both ancient and modern, Brigham Young eagerly seized on this external threat to consolidate his power. He also ramped up Mormon recruitment efforts in Great Britain and Scandinavia (where Mormon missionaries carefully concealed the doctrine of polygamy) as a way of building up his kingdom. To cut down on the time and expense involved in bringing new Mormons to Zion, Young ordered the construction of handcarts – rickshaw-like vehicles – used to carry the pilgrims and their possessions across the plains.
The handcart initiative led to disaster in late 1856 as two companies of Mormon immigrants (known as the Martin and Willie companies), promised by Mormon leaders that God would hold back the winter snows, were caught in an abnormally early and severe blizzard. More than 200 men, women, and children died, making the Martin/Willie debacle ‘the worst disaster in the history of America’s overland trails’.
Mormon leaders refused to shoulder any blame for the catastrophe. Jedediah Grant ... laid the blame on the victims ... ‘the same disobedience and sinfulness that had induced spiritual sleepiness among the people already in Zion’. Will Bagley author Blood of the Prophets
Mormon historians have generally glossed over Utah’s Civil War history with an anecdote describing how Abraham Lincoln explained his Mormon policy to businessman Stenhouse. When clearing land, the Lincolns occasionally encountered a log that was ‘too hart to split, too wet to burn and too heavy to move so ploughed around it’. The president had resolved to treat the Mormons like the stump and to let them alone. But Lincoln’s Utah policy was not simply to plow around the Mormons; he was determined to fence them in. To do this, he sent enough military power to enforce federal authority. Despite efforts to have Brigham Young reappointed governor, none of the officers Lincoln named to positions in Utah were Mormons. He carefully managed the political situation while challenging the Mormons’ most treasured doctrine. Lincoln observed during a speech in 1857 there was nothing in the US Constitution or law that banned polygamy, and he corrected the situation in 1862 when he signed Justin Morrill’s bill to ban polygamy in the territories. The Mormons simply ignored the law, and in the tumult of the Civil War it became a dead lear.
Beyond calling up a single company of Lot Smith’s cavalry for ninety days, Lincoln did not mobilize Utah’s Nauvoo Legion. Instead he sent Colonel Patrick Edward Connor and the Third California Infantry, troops desperately needed elsewhere, to guard the overland trails and ensure the loyalty of the Saints. Unfettered by the politics that had shackled his predecessors, Connor marched his troops into Utah in October 1862 and occupied the heights east of Great Salt Lake City, where he built Camp Douglas. ibid. p252
It was at Mountain Meadows, a southern Utah oasis, that Mormon militiamen slaughtered the entire complement (save 17 small children younger than eight, who were regarded as ‘innocent blood’ under Mormon doctrine) of a California-bound wagon-train on 11th September 1857. The wagon-train’s considerable wealth in livestock, assets, and gold was plundered, much of it being taken by Mormon leaders as ‘tithes’. Among the atrocity’s victims were several Mormon ‘back-outs’ or apostates, who were ‘blood-atoned’ for the supposed sin of trying to flee to California.
The surviving children were adopted by Mormon families, some of them taken into the homes of the men who murdered their parents (pleas from the child survivors’ relatives in Arkansas resulted in federal action to return them to their families). Despite the involvement of high-ranking Mormon leaders and a trail of evidence leading up to Brigham Young himself, only one man – John D Lee – was tried and executed, 20 years later, for the massacre. ibid.
After they had driven us and our families, they commenced a difficulty in Daviess County, adjoining this county, in which they began to rob and burn houses etc. etc. took honey which they, (the Mormons) call sweet oil, and hogs which they call bear, and cattle which they called buffalo. Thus they would justify themselves by saying, ‘We are the people of God, and all things are God’s; therefore, they are ours.’ John Whitmer, History of the Church
After they had driven us and our families, they commenced a difficulty in Daviess County, adjoining this county, in which they began to rob and burn houses etc. etc. took honey which they, (the Mormons) call sweet oil, and hogs which they call bear, and cattle which they called buffalo. Thus they would justify themselves by saying, ‘We are the people of God, and all things are God’s; therefore, they are ours.’ John Whitmer, History of the Church
The prosecution’s witnesses included not only long-time accusers such as John Whitmer and W W Phelps ... but also several more recently-added individuals to the growing list of dissenters [including] ... Sampson Avard, supposedly the most loyal follower of them all. He spilled his proverbial guts, exposing to a Gentile court of law every Danite secret. He even produced a list of Danite officers, which included a Secretary of War. The judge, it seemed, was seeking specific information proving Smith’s plans to establish a kingdom within the US – a treasonous offense.
Following six months of imprisonment in Liberty Jail, Smith and his cohorts were transferred to Boone County, Missouri, to stand trial against evidence so compelling that Abanes describes it as ‘doom[ing] [them] to a life of imprisonment’.
As fleeting fate would have it, however, Smith and his band of crooks, cronies and conmen managed to escape after Joseph and his brother Hyrum bribed the sheriff ‘with a jug of whiskey and $800’. Richard Abanes, One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church from p155
Samuel Smith ... seemed a reasonable choice to many Saints. In fact, he nearly took control of the Church before the Twelve had returned, much to the irritation of Willard Richards, who wanted no leader to be name until all the Apostles were present.