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I am a descendant of John D. Lee. I don’t think anyone should tell me how to “look” at it. I’ve lived with it all my life.

I'm sorry CC, I gotta call you on this one, If Isaid since I am a descendent of Govner Boggs, I can definatly say he knew about Joseph Smith's Martyring by a mob, do you think anyone would give me tha time of day? Fast Coyote, would you accept that as evidece from me? I hope not.

I tended his grave as a child. My grandmother worked to have the LDS Church reinstate his membership. Even though he was to blame for his part in the massacre, to this day, the LDS Church allows him to take the entire blame. They laid it all upon one man....I personally think it is cowardly and disgusting, and it’s about time someone looked at this deed, even if it takes a fictionalized movie to bring it to the fore.

You know, I thought about taking this and doing a parody of the Extermination order (signed by Govoner Boggs), but I think it is funny enough to just repost.

“I’m sorry CC, I gotta call you on this one, If Isaid since I am a descendent of Govner Boggs, I can definatly say he knew about Joseph Smith’s Martyring by a mob, do you think anyone would give me tha time of day? Fast Coyote, would you accept that as evidece from me? I hope not.”

I wouldn’t be surprised at such a possibility. However, it wasn’t governor Bogg’s who looked the other way at Joseph Smith’s execution (I don’t consider it a martyring, but an exercise of military justice). Smith was lucky to escape execution at Liberty Jail in Missouri for leading the Mormon War. When Smith got to Nauvoo, he had himself ordained king, raised an army of 2000 ex Danites, ran for president, and crushed the opposition press (Nauvoo Expositor) - so he was clearly on a secessionist path and as at Far West threatened a civil war.

It was Illinois Governor Thomas Ford who looked the other way when the mob went and killed Smith at the Carthage jail. Given the circumstances, I would have done the same.

Governor Ford would have been well aware of what had happened in the Mormon War in Missouri, and how most of the Mormon leaders had been sent to jail but either escaped or were released. If the Mormon Legion had reached the Carthage jail first and broken Joseph Smith out, there would have been bloody hell to pay in the form of a civil war, Smith would not have given up peacefully like he did at Far West (he had a six barrel pepperpot pistol smuggled into jail and fired it 6 times, he had planned to escape obviously).

According to one of Smith’s bodyguards, Allen Joseph Stout writes that after Joseph and Hyrum were taken to Carthage and jailed, the Prophet wrote an official order to Jonathan Dunham to bring the Nauvoo Legion to Carthage to save “him from being killed, but Dunham did not let a single man or mortal know that he had received such orders, and we (the Legion) were kept in the city under arms not knowing but all was well, “till the mob came and forced the prison and slew Joseph and Hyrum Smith”.

So I would consider Ford’s looking the other way when the “mob” took off to kill Smith as a form of executive decision akin to ordering a military execution to avoid a civil war. Ford already had the Illinois militia out, but he needed to keep order so he must have tried to put some distance between the mob and the militia and the Legion otherwise Nauvoo would have been completely burned.

So actually I give Bogg’s and Ford high marks for doing what needed to be done. Even Bogg’s extermination order was provoked by Mormon Rigdon’s earlier Danite extermination order, and in the end Bogg’s allowed his commanding general to hold his troops from annihilating Far West and only evict the Mormons, not exterminate. Reed Peck, who you denounce, was apparently (with others) instrumental in convincing the general that it was Smith and the ringleaders (like Parley Pratt, Mitt’s great great grandad) who had duped the Mormons into war, otherwise an extermination might well have occurred.

There are two sides to all this history, not just the “we poor Mormons are always persecuted” side. You know, Far West was as happy as a clam and thriving in the midst of the Gentiles before Joseph Smith and Rigdon hightailed it there (after their Kirtland Bank and Monroe bank Ponzi game fell apart). It was Smith and Rigdon who were poison to Far West, just as Smith became poison to Nauvoo. Smith’s Delusions of Grandeur are what led to Mormon persecution, not the prejudice against Mormonism.