Haun's Mill is a place of significance in Mormon history. On October 30, 1838, an armed mob led by the sheriff of nearby Livingston County rode their horses into the peaceful settlement of Mormon farmers and gunned down the men, women, and children. The Mormons attempted to hide in a barn, but the mob aimed their guns between the slats and fired indiscriminately. Seventeen died, fifteen were wounded. The dead were dumped into a deep well and buried. Their bodies remain there to this day.
This scene was depicted on the recent episode (#3) of the limited FX/ Hulu series, Under the Banner of Heaven.
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| Haun's Mill, Missouri in 2015 |
As I rolled onto the Haun's Mill property, I was surprised. The LDS Church had just purchased the property from the Community of Christ a few years earlier in 2012. I had made the pilgrimage to several LDS sites over the years - the St. George Tabernacle, the Lion House, Liberty Jail, Joseph Smith's birthplace in Sharon, Vermont, Nauvoo - and all of the church history sites were set up the same way. Parking lots. Visitor's centers. An elderly couple giving rehearsed tours and answering questions. Not Haun's Mill. It was bare and unadorned. I don't know what it's like now, but in 2015, it was a lonely stretch of dirt road, a set of tire tracks though the grass. The utter silence and lack of visitors was deafening. The road leads to an unremarkable copse of trees with a creek running through it. A solitary marker was the only evidence that you were standing on a site of historical significance. (The official monument and millstone are miles away in nearby Breckenridge.) But the haunted, desolate feeling of Haun's Mill was palpable. A heavy feeling clung to the air like a pall hanging over the place, and I could feel it. This location of massacre has a hold on the collective Mormon memory, and yet it is a place that seems to want to be forgotten.
The visit to Haun's Mill was part of a personal tour being given to me by local historian and former mayor of nearby Chillicothe, Jeffrey Foli, taking us to various sites in Daviess, Caldwell, and Livingston Counties that pertained to the 1838 Mormon War, a series of conflicts between Mormon settlers and local Missourians that led to a state-sanctioned Extermination Order and the forced expulsion of the Latter-Day Saints out of Missouri. As we stood on the grassy clearing of Haun's Mill, Jeff reverently recounted to our small group the details of the gruesome massacre, including how a young Missouri man named Ira Glaze, who may have had mental issues, pressed the barrel of his shotgun against the forehead of a 10-year-old Mormon boy named Sardius Smith and pulled the trigger. A Missouri onlooker coldly remarked, "Nits breed lice." This scene was also portrayed on Under the Banner of Heaven.
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| Me at Haun's Mill in 2015 |
Jeff told us that, a few days earlier, Ira Glaze was captured by the Mormon militia in the vicinity of a buried cannon, abandoned by the Missouri mob. The Mormons took the poor boy, stripped him naked, tied him to the cannon, and marched the cannon with Glaze strapped to it for miles in the hot sun to their encampment at Adam-Ondi-Ahman. There, Joseph Smith rallied his brothers-in-arms by personally discharging the cannon, with shouts of "Hosanna" before they released Ira Glaze, who returned, skulking and seething, back to his Missouri comrades.
The question I ask myself - if my Mormon forebearers had not humiliated and assaulted Ira Glaze by stripping him naked and strapping him to a cannon, would he have thought twice about raising a rifle to the head of a little boy? Who caused that anger within him, that murderous rage? We did. And violence always begets violence.
In Mormon culture, we tend to see ourselves as the victims at the hands of the Missouri mobs. But rarely do we try to understand how we provoked the attacks or where our own fault lies. Jeff's tour helped me to see this. We took land, made unfair business trades, voted in bloc. They burned our homes, plundered our farms, and drove us from our lands. But we Mormons also burned their homes, plundered their farms, and drove them from their lands. They murdered us. We murdered them.
Missouri changed us. Years of persecution and perpetual hounding marked our culture permanently. In The Kingdom Or Nothing, author Samuel Taylor recounts the history of his grandfather, John Taylor, who would eventually go on to become the third president of the LDS Church. John Taylor had been a Methodist preacher in Toronto when he converted to the Mormon Church. He had been with the Saints in Kirtland, Ohio and had known the peace, love, and glad tidings of the restored gospel. He moved to Far West, Missouri in the midst of the Mormon War and found a marked difference in the Saints compared to in Ohio. More militant. Ready for violence. In Ohio, leaders like Brigham Young and Joseph Smith had been affable and good-natured. In Missouri, hardship, persecution, and loss had hardened them. They walked around the encampment armed with rifles. It was then that John Taylor realized that he wasn't just a minister. He was a soldier in a real war. This realization changed him for the rest of his life. And it changed all of the Mormon population. Our beloved prophet murdered. Blood oaths. The Oath of Vengeance. Danites. Destroying Angels. Frontier justice. Mountain Meadows. Blood atonement. Murder.
We have a dark past...
And Under the Banner has brought some of that past under scrutiny. It has been interesting to be online and see the visceral reactions of Mormons to both the book and the television program which illustrates violent episodes from our history, culminating to the transition of the Laffertys from faithful Latter-Day Saints to violent zealots who used their religion as an excuse to murder Brenda Wright Lafferty and her baby daughter, Erica. It has been interesting to feel my own reaction, my own defensiveness. This discomfort at looking at our past being elucidated by a TV show is proof to me that we have some owning-up to do, some true soul-searching. For years, we have swept our past under the proverbial rug. Perhaps it's time to confront it, discuss it, come to terms with it. Only then can we truly move forward.
Don't get me wrong - I think that neither the book nor TV series are pristine. Jon Krakauer's narrative is lurid, too sweeping. Dustin Lance Black's dialogue is too hokey and feels stilted. And yet they got so many things right. The worthiness interview with the bishop. Anyone who has been in the LDS Church knows how uncomfortable they are. I can't think of anything more humiliating than being a gawky preteen in an office alone with a grown-ass man and being asked by the bishop whether or not you masturbate. And the ensuing discussion between Jeb Pyre (Andrew Garfield) and his wife was beautifully acted out and rang so true to the Mormon experience.
And then the temple endowment. The endowment... I have always disliked when TV shows or movies portray the temple ceremony. I didn't like it in Big Love, and I don't like it in Under the Banner of Heaven. It's too sacred to me. However, I understand how this portrayal drives the plot forward. Although, I have to admit - it was beautifully executed. They did a fantastic job stylistically. They didn't quite get everything right about the particulars of the ceremony. (Neither did Big Love.) It has given me quite a bit of opportunity to talk about our temple ceremonies online. Not many Latter-Day Saints are very well-versed in the symbolism and meaning in such an esoteric ritual, because they are not given proper instruction. Conversely, Mormon fundamentalists - like me - were given instructions to help us understand the endowment, and thus probably know more about it than our LDS counterparts.
But the topic that has been discussed the most online following this episode is that of blood atonement, the idea taught by Brigham Young, and others, that some sins are so pernicious that they can only be remedied by the spilling of your blood. There are rumors of the early days of Utah, blood atonements being carried out all throughout the desert. Over the course of this week, I have seen some weird attempts at trying to justify the concept. On the flip side, I have heard some ex-Mormons imply that, if you retain your belief and faith in this religion, you are condoning blood atonement. I reject both points of view.
In a recent panel discussion last week for Sunstone Foundation, I stated quite adamantly that, as a Mormon fundamentalist, I totally reject the concept of blood atonement. I don't care if Brigham Young taught it. I don't believe in it. At all. First of all, because it negates the saving power of Christ's atonement. Next, because it usurps God's authority to decide who lives and who dies. I would never want the power to decide someone's fate, nor would I want anyone to have that power over me. That is treading on dangerous ground - the very same ground tread upon by the Laffertys! No, thank you! If that makes me some sort of liberal or progressive Mormon, so be it! Blood atonement - I'm not here for it! Our religion ought to be a religion of peace.
To quote Jiddu Krisnamurti:
"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."
Or better yet, read the words of Joseph Smith:
"But meddle not with any man for his religion: all governments ought to permit every man to enjoy his religion unmolested. No man is authorized to take away life in consequence of difference of religion, which all laws and governments ought to tolerate and protect, right or wrong. Every man has a natural, and, in our country, a constitutional right to be a false prophet, as well as a true prophet. If I show, verily, that I have the truth of God, and show that ninety-nine out of every hundred professing religious ministers are false teachers, having no authority, while they pretend to hold the keys of God's kingdom on earth, and was to kill them because they are false teachers, it would deluge the whole world with blood."
You can listen to more about Mormon history in Missouri on my recent podcast discussion with Lindsay Hansen Park on Year of Polygamy.
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