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Source: Church History Vol. 2 Chapter 13 Page: 249 (~1838)

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249 "STATEMENT OF AMANDA SMITH, WIDOW OF

WARREN SMITH.

"'To whom this may concern:-I do hereby certify that my husband, Warren Smith, in company with several other families, were moving from Ohio to Missouri. We came to Caldwell County. Whilst we were traveling, minding our own business, we were stopped by a mob; they told us that if we went another step they would kill us all. They took our guns from us (as [we] were going into a new country, we took guns along with us); they took us back five miles, placed a guard around us, there kept us three days and let us go.

"'I thought: Is this our boasted land of liberty? For some said we must deny our faith, or they would kill us; others said we should die at any rate. The names of this mob, or the heads, were Thomas R. Bryan, county clerk, Jefferson Bryan, William Ewell, and James Austin, all of Livingston County. After they let us go we traveled ten miles, came to a small town composed of one grist mill, one saw mill, and eight or ten houses belonging to our brethren; there we stopped for the night.

"'A little before sunset a mob of three hundred came upon us. The men hallooed for the women and children to run for the woods; and they ran into an old blacksmith shop, for they feared if we all ran together they would rush upon us and kill the women and children. The mob fired before we had time to start from our camp. Our men took off their hats and swung them and cried "quarter" until they were shot. The mob paid no attention to their cries nor entreaties, but fired incessantly.

"I took my little girls-my boys I could not find-and started for the woods. The mob encircled us on all sides but the brook. I ran down the bank, across the mill pond on a plank, up the hill into the bushes. The bullets whistled all the way like hail, and cut down the bushes on all sides of us. One girl was wounded by my side and fell over a log, and her clothes hung across the log; and they shot at them, expecting they were hitting her; and our people afterwards cut out of that log twenty bullets.

(page 249)

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