The Tragic History Of Mormonism

The early Latter-day Saints are most famous for practicing polygamy, a form of marriage that was just as weird and controversial then as it is now. (Yeah, we're looking at you, Warren Jeffs.) According to PBS, Joseph Smith started thinking about plural marriage as early as 1831, but he lied about it. Publicly, he told everyone who would listen how bad a man marrying more than one woman was. Meanwhile, he was taking part in so many weddings it's amazing he found time to do anything else. Big Think says it's estimated Joseph took anywhere between 29-48 wives during his lifetime.

Joseph Smith wasn't just worried about the reaction of other people. He first had to deal with the anger of his wife, Emma. True West magazine describes Emma (pictured), who married Joseph in 1827, as "the first woman to 'despise' polygamy." She read his revelation, allegedly from God, that he needed to marry more women in 1843, and she wasn't having it. He went ahead with his plans anyway, which was "an excruciating ordeal" for her.

Nor was it necessarily great for those other women. Joseph would basically tell a woman that God had ordered him to take her as another wife, and she didn't have much choice in the matter. A woman named Eliza found the idea of marrying the prophet "repugnant," and other women probably felt similarly, especially when he also married their sisters or mothers. Sometimes those women were already married to other men. And they weren't all grown women, either. At least one of Joseph's wives was a girl of just 14.

The 1838 extermination order issued by Governor Lilburn Boggs was exactly the permission that hostile locals needed to go after the Latter-day Saints in a big way. And that year saw the start of what would become known as the Missouri Mormon War. Three days after the order was signed, on October 30, a slaughter occurred which BYU Professor Alexander L. Baugh called the "singular most tragic event in terms of loss of life and injury enacted by an anti-Mormon element against the Latter-day Saints in our entire church's history."

According to PBS, that afternoon, a group of 240 non-Mormon men rode into the small Mormon village of Haun's Mill (sometimes spelled Hawn's Mill). Despite a "flag of truce," and with no warning, they started shooting. Residents fled to the blacksmith's shop, but the mob just stuck their guns through the cracks in the logs and kept firing until "most in the building [were] dead." Around 1,600 rounds of ammo were spent on 40 people. A shocking 18 or 19 were killed, and around 15 were wounded, including a woman, a seven-year-old boy, and men in their 70s. After it was over, survivors dumped the dead in the town's well and fled.

It was, pretty much by definition, overkill. The Mormons were seriously outnumbered, had no advanced warning an attack was coming, and weren't even involved in any kind of direct conflict with the men who killed them. It was the darkest moment in the Missouri War, and within the next year, 8,000 Mormons fled the state.

The trek to now-Utah, which wasn't part of the US at that time and essentially at the ends of the earth, was difficult for the Mormons. But once they got there, things got worse. Just like everywhere white people showed up and claimed land, it turned out not-so-white people were already living there and were kind of using that land, thank you very much.

In 1849, Brigham Young blamed a "renegade band of Indians" for stealing some of his horses and cattle, so he sent a militia of 44 Mormons to get them back, according to The Black Hawk War: Utah's Forgotten History. Captain John Scott attacked a group of Native Americans at Battle Creek, killing at least four men and taking 12 women and children captive. This event became known as the Battle Creek Massacre and the "first battle with the Indians." It wouldn't be the last.

Just a few days later, a group of about 150 Mormons left Salt Lake City for what would become Provo, with orders to settle there and "remove the Indian people from their land." The Saints built Fort Utah and started competing for resources and food with the Native Americans, causing tensions. The local tribe, the Timpanogos, ended up starving and dying of measles, with the Mormons refusing to help. Then three Mormon men murdered an Indian named Old Bishop in cold blood and boasted about it. Problems between the two groups were coming to a head.

After slaughtering the Timpanogos and Utes in 1850, things didn't exactly get better between the Native peoples and the Mormon settlers. The Indians continued starving while the interlopers hoarded food and resources. There were skirmishes between the two sides, until finally on April 9, 1865, representatives of the Utes and the Mormons met to try and resolve their differences. However, according to Utah History Encyclopedia, an angry (and probably drunk) Latter-day Saint yanked a young chief off his horse. The Natives stormed off, vowing retaliation for the insult. And they meant it.

Over the next few days, Utes killed five Mormons and stole thousands of heads of cattle, led by a man known to the whites as Black Hawk. By the end of the year, thousands of more cows had been stolen, and 25 more settlers were dead. Eventually, that number would rise to 70 Mormon casualties.

The Latter-day Saints "considered themselves in a state of open warfare" with Black Hawk's followers and started killing Native Americans indiscriminately, even if they were from friendly tribes. The United States government, still suspicious of the Mormons, ignored their pleas for help, but it didn't tell them to stop killing Natives either, and hundreds died. The war raged for two years, until things started chilling out a bit in 1867, and a year later, Black Hawk signed a peace treaty, although hostilities between the two groups continued on and off until federal troops finally showed up in 1872. Even now, the Black Hawk War remains the "longest, costliest, and bloodiest" conflict in Utah's history.

If it seems like the Mormons were trigger-happy, that might be because of a controversial doctrine of the early church. According to Joseph Smith himself, (via Famous Trials) some sins were worse than others. Some sins were so super duper bad, there was only one way to get forgiveness for them: The sinner had to bleed. Sure, regular Christian doctrine says that Jesus' blood was spilled to atone for everyone's sins, no matter how serious, but Smith said nuh-uh. For sinners that were "beyond the reach of the atoning blood of Christ" the "only hope" was bleeding all over the darn place, up to and including dying.

Brigham Young took Smith's idea and ran with it. But maybe a sinner disagreed they were that bad. Maybe they wanted their blood to stay on the inside. In that case, Brigham Young asked his followers, "Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed his blood?" In other words, if Mormons killed evil people, whether they were part of the church or not, it was actually a good thing. They were saving souls.

This was such a controversial idea, let alone practice, that the Saints abandoned it in 1889. Since then, church leaders and Mormon historians have tried very hard to deny Blood Atonement was ever a doctrine or anything more than a theoretical idea. Sermons encouraging it were supposedly simply part of the "rhetorical, emotional oratory" style of the time. So take your pick.

Traveling from Illinois to now-Utah after Joseph Smith's death was incredibly difficult. It was a 1,300-mile trek, before cars, roads, modern medicine, air conditioning, or heaters. But the Church asked believers to do it, saying, "Let them come on foot, with handcarts or wheelbarrows; let them gird up their loins and walk." While girding one's loins sounds fun and all, walking 1,300 miles while pulling a handcart with all your belongings and children in it does not. A "short" journey to Utah might only take nine weeks, but others would struggle across the trail for up to four months.

But for many, the journey had started long before. These days Mormons are famous for their missionaries, and that's kind of been their thing from the beginning. According to Legends of America, thousands of Mormon converts moved all the way from the UK and Scandinavia, told to come help protect the original group of Mormons now in Utah by increasing its numbers.

The number of convert immigrants would be significantly reduced by the time they got there, though. In 1856, two groups of handcart Mormons started late and hit trouble. The going was so slow they began running out of supplies, and they discarded extra weight, including important items like blankets. When blizzards hit, people started dying. Others had body parts amputated to stop frostbite and gangrene. In the end, over 200 people, more than 20 percent of those who set out in the groups, died before reaching Salt Lake City.