RLDS Church History Context

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Source: Church History Vol. 1 Chapter 12 Page: 335 (~1833)

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335 cattle. They also burned two hundred and three houses.'

I was chased by about sixty of these ruffians five miles. I fled to the south and my wife was driven north to Clay County, and for three weeks I knew not whether my family were dead or alive, neither did they know what was my fate. At one time I was three days without food. When I found my family I found them on the banks of the Missouri River under a rag carpet tent, short of food and raiment. In this deplorable situation, on the 27th of December, my wife bore me a son."

The reader will note that this happened in November and December, and that this man was named in the agreement as one of those to go unmolested, providing he went by January 1. We doubt not but the saints sometimes did wrong, and sometimes resisted when forbearance would have been better policy. For instance, this man Wight is said to have been one of the fighting characters; especially so in the later trials of 1838; but is it any wonder, when looking at it from a natural standpoint, that he would fight when confronted by such men as S. D. Lucas and Moses Wilson, the very men who were instrumental in heaping such hardships and indignities upon his family, while his wife was in such a critical and delicate condition, and he absent from home, fleeing for his life?

Elder Hiram Rathbun, of Lansing, Michigan, who was an eyewitness to some of these scenes, testified under oath in the famous Temple Lot suit as follows:-

"Members of the church were living here from 1831 to 1833. They left here in the month of November, 1833. The occasion of their leaving was that they had to leave. They were driven out of the country by the citizens of Independence and the vicinity. They were driven out by the people around about here.

"The cause of their being driven out, the people here became dissatisfied and displeased with the citizens here known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; that is, the citizens who did not belong to that church became dissatisfied with the citizens who did belong to it.

(page 335)

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