Posted on 02/11/2003 8:45:25 PM PST by Illbay
I seized my two little girls and escaped across the mill-pond on a slab-walk. Another sister fled with me. Yet though we were women, with tender children, in flight for our lives, the demons poured volley after volley to kill us. A number of bullets entered my clothes, but I was not wounded. The sister, however, who was with me, cried out that she was hit. We had just reached the trunk of a fallen tree, over which I urged her, bidding her to shelter there where the bullets could not reach her, while I continued my flight to some bottom land.
When the firing had ceased I went back to the scene of the massacre, for there were my husband and three sons, of whose fate I as yet knew nothing. As I returned I found the sister in a pool of blood where she had fainted, but she was only shot through the hand. Farther on was lying dead Brother McBride, an aged white-haired revolutionary soldier. His murderer had literally cut him to pieces with an old corn-cutter. . . . Passing on I came to a scene more terrible still to the mother and wife. Emerging from the blacksmith shop was my eldest son, bearing on his shoulders his little brother Alma. "Oh! my Alma is dead!" I cried, in anguish. "No, mother; I think Alma is not dead. But father and brother Sardius are killed!"
What an answer was this to appall me! My husband and son murdered; another little son seemingly mortally wounded; and perhaps before the dreadful night should pass the murderers would return and complete their work! But I could not weep then. The fountain of tears was dry; the heart overburdened with its calamity, and all the mother's sense absorbed in its anxiety for the precious boy which God alone could save by his miraculous aid.*
It was night now. There were none left from that terrible scene, throughout that long, dark night, but about half a dozen bereaved and lamenting women, and the children. Eighteen or nineteen, all grown men excepting my murdered boy and another about the same age, were dead or dying; several more of the men were wounded, hiding away, whose groans through the night too well disclosed their hiding places, while the rest of the men had fled, at the moment of the massacre, to save their lives. The women were sobbing, in the greatest anguish of spirit; the children were crying loudly with fear and grief at the loss of fathers and brothers. . . .
[After caring for Alma's wounds,] it was then I found vent to my feelings in tears, and resigned myself to the anguish of the hour. And all that night we, a few poor, stricken women, were thus left there with our dead and wounded. All through the night we heard the groans of the dying. Once in the dark we crawled over the heap of dead in the blacksmith's shop to try to help or soothe the sufferers' wants; once we followed the cries of a wounded brother who hid in some bushes from the murderers, and relieved him all we could. It has passed from my memory whether he was dead in the morning or whether he recovered.
Next morning brother Joseph Young came to the scene of the massacre. "What shall be done with the dead?" he inquired, in horror and deep trouble. There was not time to bury them, for the mob was coming on us. Neither were there left men to dig the graves. All the men excepting the two or three who had so narrowly escaped were dead or wounded. It had been no battle, but a massacre indeed. "Do anything, Brother Joseph," I said, "rather than leave their bodies to the fiends who have killed them." There was a deep dry well close by. Into this the bodies had to be hurried, eighteen or nineteen in number. No funeral services could be performed, nor could they be buried with customary decency. The lives of those who in terror performed the last duty to the dead were in jeopardy. Every moment we expected to be fired upon by the fiends who we supposed were lying in ambush waiting [for] the first opportunity to dispatch the remaining few who had escaped the slaughter of the preceding day. . . .
I cannot leave the tragic story without relating some incidents of those five weeks when I was a prisoner with my wounded boy in Missouri, near the scene of the massacre, unable to obey the order of extermination. All the Mormons in the neighborhood had fled out of the state, excepting a few families of the bereaved women and children who had gathered at the house of Brother David Evans, two miles from the scene of the massacre. To this house Alma had been carried after that fatal night. In our utter desolation, what could we women do but pray? Prayer was our only source of comfort; our Heavenly Father our only helper. None but he could save and deliver us.
One day a mobber came from the mill with the captain's fiat: "The captain says if you women don't stop your d————d prayer he will send down a posse and kill every d————d one of you!" And he might as well have done it, as to stop us poor women praying in that hour of our great calamity. Our prayers were hushed in terror. We dared not let our voices be heard in the house in supplication. I could pray in my bed or in silence, but I could not live thus long. This godless silence was more intolerable than had been that night of the massacre. I could bear it no longer. I pined to hear once more my own voice in petition to my Heavenly Father. I stole down to a corn field, and crawled into a stalk of corn. It was as the temple of the Lord to me at that moment. I prayed aloud and most fervently.
When I emerged from the corn a voice spoke to me. It was a voice as plain as I ever heard one. It was no silent, strong impression of the spirit, but a voice, repeating a verse of the Saint's hymn:
That soul who on Jesus hath leaned for repose,From that moment I had no more fear. I felt that nothing could hurt me. Soon after this the mob sent us word that unless we were all out of the state by a certain day we should be killed. The day came, and at evening came fifty armed men to execute the sentence. I met them at the door. They demanded of me why I was not gone? I bade them enter and see their own work. They crowded into my room and I showed them my wounded boy. They came, party after party, until all had seen my excuse. Then they quarreled among themselves and came near fighting. At last they went away, all but two. These I thought were detailed to kill us. Then the two returned.
I cannot, I will not, desert to its foes;
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I'll never, no never, no never forsake!
"Madam," said one, "have you any meat in the house?"
"No," was my reply.
"Could you dress a fat hog if one was laid at your door?"
"I think we could!" was my answer. And then they went and caught a fat hog from a herd which had belonged to a now exiled brother, killed it and dragged it to my door, and departed. These men, who had come to murder us, left on the threshold of our door a meat offering to atone for their repented intention.
Yet even when my son was well I could not leave the state, now accursed indeed to the Saints. The mob had taken my horses, as they had the drove of horses, and the beeves, and the hogs, and wagons, and the tents, of the murdered and exiled. So I went down into Daviess county (ten miles) to Captain Comstock, and demanded of him my horses. There was one of them in his yard. He said I could have it if I paid five dollars for its keep. I told him I had no money. I did not fear the captain of the mob, for I had the Lord's promise that nothing should hurt me. But his wife swore that the mobbers were fools for not killing the women and children as well as the men—declaring that we would breed up a pack ten times worse than the first.
I left without the captain's permission to take my horse, or giving pay for its keep; but I went into his yard and took it, and returned to our refuge unmolested. Learning that my other horse was at the mill, I next yoked up a pair of steers to a sled and went and demanded it also. Comstock was there at the mill. He gave me the horse, and then asked if I had any flour. "No; we have had none for weeks." He then gave me about fifty pounds of flour and some beef, and filled a can with honey. But the mill, and the slaughtered beeves which hung plentifully on its walls, and the stock of flour and honey, and abundant spoil besides, had all belonged to the murdered or exiled Saints. Yet was I thus providentially, by the very murderers and mobocrats themselves, helped out of the state of Missouri.
The Lord had kept his word. The soul who on Jesus had leaned for succor had not been forsaken even in this terrible hour of massacre, and in that infamous extermination of the "Mormons" from Missouri in the years 1838-39.
Andrew Jenson, LDS Biographical Encyclopedia, 2:793-97.
(Jack M. Lyon, Jay A. Parry, and Linda R. Gundry, eds., Best-Loved Stories of the LDS People, vol. 2 [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1999], 35.)
Here on FR, I see incredibly nauseating examples of religious hatred and intolerance. When there are no constraints, however, this is where it can lead.
Let us recall the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and, though we understand it is intended to restrain OFFICIAL oppression of religious freedom, yet it enshrines a principle that should extend to the behavior of communities and individuals as well.
Then I think about Nazi Germany and the holocaust. I think about the tales now coming out of the Horn of Africa, wherein Muslim slavers are taking whole villages of Christians and animists and selling them into bondage.
I think about the radical Islamists who are running rampant in places like the Phillipines.
And finally, I think about the vitriol directed toward "Mormons" and other religions here on FR, perpetrated by the usual gang of suspects.
I believe you're right, and there are people in whose hearts Satan rages uncontrolled.
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