American Crucifixion (39 page)

He was literally eaten alive by worms. His eye balls had fallen out, the flesh on his cheeks and neck had fallen off, and though he could breathe he could take nourishment only through an opening in his throat.

Pieces of flesh as large as two hands had reputedly fallen from different parts of his body.

Of Corporal James Belton, who bragged of taking a shot at Joseph Smith during the events of June 27, it was reported that “he died from a cancer in his eye, and when his meals were brought to him, the pus from his eye would drop in his plate.”

Like Lomax, the names of neither Belton nor Reed appear on the lists of the alleged mobbers compiled by Willard Richards, Jacob Backenstos, and William Clayton.

A crippled, elderly mobber who boasted that “I saw the last bullet shot into the old boy,” that is, Joseph, was said to be sharing a cabin with his abusive son in Coalville, Utah. The son used his father as a pack horse to carry sacks filled with coal and flayed him with a belt when the old man tarried in his work. Eventually, their cabin burned down with the father inside. Somehow, the elderly, charred parent didn’t die; local well-wishers put together a collection for some medicine, sending the son into Park City to fetch the healing lotion. Instead, the son drank the money away in a dingy saloon, and his unrepentant father-mobber succumbed in his absence.

Much wishful thinking likewise attended the fates of the principals in
People v. Levi Williams, et al
. But in the main, the “respectable set of men” who murdered Joseph and Hyrum thrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. Mark Aldrich moved to Tucson and served as president of the Arizona territorial legislature. Jacob Davis, a state senator in 1844, later became a congressman. William Grover was appointed US attorney for the eastern district of Missouri.
Nauvoo Expositor
collaborator Chauncey Higbee lived a long life in Pittsfield, Illinois, where he worked as a judge, a banker, and a state senator. He had a high school named after him in 1908. Robert F. Smith, the Carthage Greys captain who sealed Joseph Smith’s fate, became a colonel in the Illinois militia and served with distinction in the Civil War. He rose to the rank of brigadier general and became military governor of conquered Savannah, Georgia.

William Law and his family moved first to northern Illinois, and then to Shullsburg, Wisconsin, where he practiced medicine until his death in 1892 at age eighty-three. His wife, Jane, and his brother, Wilson, who farmed in the area, died in 1883 and 1877, respectively. Five years before his death, the elderly, white-haired doctor spoke at length about Joseph Smith and the Saints with German journalist Wilhelm Wyl. “The greatest mistake of my life was my having anything to do with Mormonism,” Law told his visitor. “I feel it to be a very deep disgrace and never speak of it when I can avoid it.” Jane had long ago set fire to their only copy of the Book of Mormon, and the family had abandoned the faith. “It never was a church of Christ, but a most wicked blasphemous humbug, gotten up for the purpose of making money,” Law said. “I have no doubt thousands of honest, virtuous people joined the Church not knowing anything of the wicked workings of the leaders, and thousands (probably in ignorance) still cling to the delusion.”

His wizened hands trembling, Law heaped abused on Joseph Smith: “He was naturally base, corrupt and cruel . . . a raveling wolf. . . . He claimed to be a god, whereas he was only a servant of the Devil, and as such met his fate.” Law cared just as little for Emma, whom he called “a full accomplice of Joseph’s crimes. She was a large, coarse woman, as deep a woman as there was, always full of schemes and smooth as oil. They were worthy of each other, she was not a particle better than he.”

After Joseph Smith’s death, the fortunes of the hate-mongering Thomas Sharp soared. He won three terms as mayor of Warsaw, and four terms as an elected judge. Lionized at the 1870 meeting of the Hancock County Pioneer Association, Sharp offered some judicious, albeit unapologetic, comments on the “troublous times” of 1844. “I know there are members of this association who view the occurrences from a different standpoint from what I do,” he told the pioneers, “and it is not my desire to say anything that may wound the feelings of any here present.

In those days the blood of the people who were so unfortunate to have their homes here, was hot with excitement. Some things were undoubtedly done by the Old Settlers, and approved by them, that had better not have been done; but it must be remembered, that great excitements are always the result of great provocations, and that . . . angelic propriety of conduct is not always to be expected.

“Everybody loved Judge Sharp,” according to an “In Memoriam” note published upon his death in 1890. “His heart was always warm, cheerful, and bright, as it were in the enjoyment of the spring time of life, his clear, loud and hearty laugh was heard even in his affliction, and sounded as sweet and joyful as the song of the birds at early dawn.”

The astute Orville Browning, who ably defended the Smiths’ assassins, went on to help found the Republican Party with his friend Abraham Lincoln. Browning remained close to President Lincoln while he was in the White House and Browning was serving out a Senate term vacated by the death of Stephen Douglas. Browning became President Andrew Johnson’s secretary of the interior, then returned to Quincy, Illinois, to amass a fortune as a railroad lawyer. He invested his considerable gains in fraudulent mining schemes promoted by his son-in-law. Both Browning and his widow died penniless.

Trial judge Richard M. Young also had an unfortunate end. The former senator lived out his days at the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC, where he died in 1861.

Mormons have taken a morbid delight in chronicling the desultory fate of Governor Thomas Ford. In 1850, just four years after retiring as governor, he was penniless, with five children to support. His law practice had failed. Dying of alcoholism or tuberculosis, or both, he hoped to enrich his family by publishing his
History of Illinois.
That didn’t work. Ford and his wife died within two weeks of each other in 1850, leaving their five orphans a legacy of $100 each. The children “were taken by different philanthropic citizens of Peoria,” according to chronicler John F. Snyder, “and properly raised and educated.” Two of the daughters led more or less normal lives. The third, Mrs. Davies, died at age seventy-two after living for several years as a “county charge” in a Peoria hospital. She was “a desolate, heart-broken woman, whose past was a sealed book of bitter memories and disappointments,” according to Snyder, who noted that her predeceased husband was “a brilliant man, but like too many others he looked too often upon the wine when it was red.” One of Thomas Ford’s sons lost an arm fighting in the Civil War. His brother was hung as a horse thief in Kansas after the war, possibly the victim of mistaken identity.

Ford was initially consigned to a pauper’s grave, but the Illinois legislature appropriated $500 to build an eighteen-foot-tall marble obelisk above his final resting place in 1853. A windstorm blew it down in 1858. One Mormon historian took especial glee in reporting that “weeds, tall grass and brush have luxuriated thick and rank” over Ford’s untended grave in Peoria. “Occasionally there has been talk of raising a subscription for the purpose from the citizens of Peoria, but nobody has taken the initiative.” As recently as 1994, Mormon church president Gordon B. Hinckley repeated the grim details of Ford’s “troubled destiny” at a ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the Carthage slayings. Ford suffered a life “of unrelieved poverty and defeat,” Hinckley told his audience. “Such is the sad story of the man who violated his pledge to Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Such is the sad story of his family after him.”

God works in mysterious ways, sometimes aided by human hands. When anti-Mormon agitation started up in Hancock County a few months after the assassins’ trial in 1845, the Mormon-elected sheriff, Jacob Backenstos, became a target of the old settlers’ wrath. Backenstos tried to defend the outlying Mormon settlements from Levi Williams and like-minded marauders. Franklin Worrell, who “guarded” the Carthage jail, professed to be infuriated by Backenstos’s election. “I am
Mad, Mad
,” Worrell wrote to the
Upper Mississippian
newspaper, “yes mad as the devil—Damn Such a Set of Miscreants as we have in this county.”

Threatened with violence at his Carthage home, Backenstos resolved to move his family to Nauvoo. In mid-September, the sheriff left town in a buggy and noticed that a small band of armed men was following him. After overnighting in Warsaw, heading north on the Nauvoo road, he saw Worrell and seven other armed men pursuing him on horseback, with a rifle-filled wagon trailing behind. Near Golden’s Point, Backenstos happened upon two Mormons, Return Jackson Redden and Orrin Porter Rockwell, who were helping a family of burned-out Saints move back into Nauvoo. With his pursuers just 150 yards behind him, Backenstos cried out for help. Rockwell galloped to his aid, and Backenstos ordered his pursuers to stop. They continued to ride toward him. The sheriff ordered Rockwell to fire, and Joseph Smith’s childhood friend raised his rifle and shot Worrell squarely in the torso, catapulting him four feet off his saddle onto the ground.

At the sound of the shots, Jacob Baum, a Mormon farmer, ran up to find out what was happening on his property.

“I got him,” Rockwell said.

“Got who?”

“Worrell. I was afraid my rifle wouldn’t reach him, but it did, thank God.”

The terrified mobbers reined in, loaded Worrell’s corpse into their wagon, and rode back to Carthage. Worrell died on the way.

The Saints’ prayers had been answered.

Backenstos and Rockwell were both indicted for the Worrell killing, which took place in broad daylight. Both were acquitted.

Rockwell himself lived for another thirty-three years, traveling with the Saints to Utah, where he became a notorious enforcer and bodyguard for church president Brigham Young. He married four times, but never polygamously; Joseph’s “principle” was not for him. Toward the end of both of their lives—Young would die in 1877, Rockwell in 1878—Young apparently tired of Rockwell’s hard-drinking ways and exiled him to Fish Lake in central Utah to “colonize the straggling bands of natives in the vicinity [and] teach them honesty, industry, morality and religion.”

The hardened mountain man who had shared a bottle of moonshine with the British explorer Sir Richard Burton in a remote Utah canyon quickly tired of missionary work. He returned to Salt Lake City, where he collapsed of heart failure after an early-hours visit to a local saloon. Rockwell died while under federal indictment for a murder he may well have committed; we will never know. The
Salt Lake Tribune
—the city had become large and diverse enough to sustain a non-Mormon newspaper—knew he
was
guilty and exulted in Rockwell’s death: “Thus the gallows was cheated of one of the fittest candidates that ever cut a throat or plundered a traveler.” “A fanatical devotee of the Prophet,” the paper continued,

He killed fellow Saints who held secrets that menaced the safety of their fellow criminals in the priesthood. He killed Apostates who dared to wag their tongues about the wrongs they had endured. And he killed mere sojourners in Zion merely to keep his hand in.

“The recollection of his evil deeds haunted him,” the
Tribune
insisted, and

to gain escape from this fiery torment he sought the intoxicating bowl, and whenever he appeared in the streets of Salt Lake, it was generally in the character of a vociferating maniac.

A thousand Saints jammed the Fourteenth Ward assembly rooms in Salt Lake for Rockwell’s funeral. Eulogist Joseph F. Smith, Hyrum’s son and a future church president, allowed that the deceased “had his little faults, but Porter’s life on earth, taken altogether, was one worthy of example, and reflected honor upon the Church.”

A “fitting tribute of one outlaw to the memory of another,” the
Tribune
sneered.

Rockwell’s name lived on in more than one cowboy ballad, including this one:

Have you heard of Porter Rockwell, the Mormon Triggerite, They say he hunts down outlaws when the moon is shining bright. So if you rustle cattle, I’ll tell you what to do, Get the drop on Porter Rockwell, or he’ll get the drop on you.

THE TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD EMMA HALE, WHO FIRST MET JOSEPH Smith when he came to dig for money on her father’s Pennsylvania farm, was deemed to be quite a catch: five feet, nine inches tall, vivacious, with distinctive hazel eyes set off by her olive complexion. Most of her life she wore her hair long, brushing it to a dark sheen, with her tresses gathered in twin braids at the nape of her neck.

In the winter of 1879, Emma was seventy-four years old, still tall, and wore her gray hair combed in two soft waves over her temples. “Her face was thin; her nose lean, aquiline and pointed,” recalled one of the many visitors Emma received at the Nauvoo Mansion that she had shared with Joseph and his multiple wives some forty years previously. Another visitor called her “a picture of a fine woman, stranded on the lee-shore of age . . . among people who did not appreciate her intellect or her innate refinement.” After a brief period of exile in upstate Illinois, she had moved back to the mansion in 1847. On December 23 of that year—that day that would have been Joseph Smith’s forty-second birthday—she married businessman Lewis Bidamon in a Methodist ceremony. Bidamon was a drinker, a bon vivant, and an adventurer; eighteen months after their wedding, he ran off to the California gold rush. He managed to remain Emma’s somewhat loyal companion for thirty-two years. At the end of her life, Emma was keeping tavern at the mansion in an awkward ménage à trois with Bidamon and his mistress, Nancy Abercrombie, the mother of Bidamon’s illegitimate son, Charles. On her deathbed, Emma asked Nancy and Lewis to marry, to spare Charles the indignity of bastardy. They did so, and lived as man and wife until Bidamon died twelve years later.