Comment by freedomben
3 years ago
There's a decent amount of nuance missing in your story, and I would (truly) love a source if you have one for this as I've not heard evidence before (just speculation):
> So when they heard a mob approaching the jail where he was kept, he actually told the jail guards that his militia was coming and they didn't want to die for this.
But let's stipulate all that for the sake of discussion. Does that really sound more strange than Moses' magic tricks, or the "magicians" all through the Old Testament, or even the very idea that God himself came down as a person to be brutally killed in order to save human souls who simply believe on him, and if they don't believe then he will torture them for all eternity in a burning pit of fire? Frankly the Mormon founding seems a whole lot less strange to me.
It comes from a letter written by Thomas Halman or Holman, Jr, one of the guards, to a George Weston on 30 July 1844 (about a month later). The letter is in the Special Collections of the Newberry Library in Chicago. I have been unable to find a digitized copy of this letter anywhere online, with the only quotation from it being that when Halman was concerned about the approaching mob, Joseph said "Don't trouble yourself ... they have come to rescue me." Nothing else of the letter seems to be easily available, and most of the references to it are erroneously citing the wrong book by Dr. D. Michael Quinn with the wrong date (it comes from his "Origins of Power" book, page 141).
So, it seems reasonable to accept the source as it is a first-hand account written within a short time frame of the event. However, all we have currently (until someone decides to digitize the letter) is these few words from it.
(Link to a 1966 bibliography that lists the letter's existence and location in the Newberry Library: https://www.siue.edu/lovejoy-library/tas/Kimball_Sources.pdf page 20)
Edit: I was incorrect with my assumption that the author of the letter was one of the guards. I've been unable to determine the names of the guards at Carthage that day, so the letter does not represent a first-hand account, as I thought, but instead represents what was being commonly relayed by local residents of Carthage at the time. I found a larger quotation in an article from the 1995 JWHA journal (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sv9HIDgATUM7tPxlbd-UcX7uvIV... page 26). It seems the author of the letter is trying to simply relay all of the known information about the attack and murder of the Smiths.
Nice, thank you!