violence, matching their tormentors burned hay rick for burned hay rick, and rustled cattle herd for rustled cattle herd. The excitable Sidney Rigdon preached a sermon on July 4, 1838, rallying the Saints to “a war of extermination” against their enemies. (In the early nineteenth century, “extermination” meant to expel, not necessarily to annihilate.) Four months later, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued his infamous Extermination Order, directed against Missouri’s Mormons. A short, bloody, three-month-long war ensued, with casualties on both sides. A ghastly atrocity—the massacre and mutilation of seventeen defenseless Mormons, including two children, trapped inside a blacksmith shop at Haun’s Mill—effectively ended the Mormon War, which the Mormons could never have hoped to win.
The Missourians clapped the Mormon leaders, including Rigdon and Joseph Smith, in jail, and observed a brief cease-fire that allowed the Saints to flee across the frozen Mississippi River to Illinois. There, the residents of Quincy, a commercial port, and other Illinois towns graciously received the bedraggled refugees, whom they viewed as victims of coarse Missouri bigotry. Illinois residents were quick to believe the worst about the “pukes,” their unflattering epithet for the Missourians. “The citizens responded to the call and donated liberally,” recalled Wandle Mace, a prosperous Mormon who had relocated his family from New York. He reported that citizens filled “a large canoe with flour, pork, coffee, sugar, boots, shoes and clothing, the merchants vieing [
sic
]with each other as to which could be the most liberal,” and sent it across the river, to an encampment of freezing Mormon refugees.
Accepting handouts was hardly the Mormons’ style; more than provisions, they desperately needed a new home. Sensing an opportunity, the New York Land Company’s “Dr.” Isaac Galland quickly found his way to the bedraggled Saints.
Galland, who had neither medical training nor legal education—he also claimed to be a lawyer—had likewise not studied for the ministry, although he did occasionally mount the pulpit on both sides of the Mississippi. He was a charming scalawag, a convicted horse thief and counterfeiter who had abandoned three wives in different parts of the country. Newspaper editor Thomas Gregg once recalled meeting “that dark-eyed, dark-hued, inexplicable, incomprehensible, unfathomable man, Dr. Isaac Galland—whom no man could see through.” When he ran for Congress in 1834, Galland made light of his checkered reputation. “I’ve been found guilty of almost everything except hog stealing,” he said, “and I never owned a hog.”
The New York Land Company and Galland had acquired some claims on a huge block of Iowa real estate called the Half-Breed Tract. In an 1824 treaty, Congress had set aside the 186 square miles to be settled by the mixed-blood descendants of the Sauk (also known as the Sac) and Fox Indian tribes. Legitimate claimants were hard to find, and an army of swindlers and con men descended upon the open prairie, where the lots were the subject of near-constant litigation.
Galland and his employer had sufficient claim to convince Joseph Smith to negotiate a land purchase from his jail cell in, of all places, Liberty, Missouri. In 1839, Smith bought 20,000 acres of land on the Iowa shore of the Mississippi as well as 700 acres in the center of a town across the river called Commerce, Illinois. Galland was a scamp and Commerce was a swamp, with one stone house and five other structures nearby. But the site had promise. The broad limestone flat sat in the middle of a sweeping, graceful horseshoe bend in the river, giving the town waterfront access on its southern, western, and northern borders. Moving east, there was plenty of room to grow, especially toward a line of bluffs and higher ground rising to the fertile prairie beyond.
“No man of understanding can come up the
The Missourians clapped the Mormon leaders, including Rigdon and Joseph Smith, in jail, and observed a brief cease-fire that allowed the Saints to flee across the frozen Mississippi River to Illinois. There, the residents of Quincy, a commercial port, and other Illinois towns graciously received the bedraggled refugees, whom they viewed as victims of coarse Missouri bigotry. Illinois residents were quick to believe the worst about the “pukes,” their unflattering epithet for the Missourians. “The citizens responded to the call and donated liberally,” recalled Wandle Mace, a prosperous Mormon who had relocated his family from New York. He reported that citizens filled “a large canoe with flour, pork, coffee, sugar, boots, shoes and clothing, the merchants vieing [
sic
]with each other as to which could be the most liberal,” and sent it across the river, to an encampment of freezing Mormon refugees.
Accepting handouts was hardly the Mormons’ style; more than provisions, they desperately needed a new home. Sensing an opportunity, the New York Land Company’s “Dr.” Isaac Galland quickly found his way to the bedraggled Saints.
Galland, who had neither medical training nor legal education—he also claimed to be a lawyer—had likewise not studied for the ministry, although he did occasionally mount the pulpit on both sides of the Mississippi. He was a charming scalawag, a convicted horse thief and counterfeiter who had abandoned three wives in different parts of the country. Newspaper editor Thomas Gregg once recalled meeting “that dark-eyed, dark-hued, inexplicable, incomprehensible, unfathomable man, Dr. Isaac Galland—whom no man could see through.” When he ran for Congress in 1834, Galland made light of his checkered reputation. “I’ve been found guilty of almost everything except hog stealing,” he said, “and I never owned a hog.”
The New York Land Company and Galland had acquired some claims on a huge block of Iowa real estate called the Half-Breed Tract. In an 1824 treaty, Congress had set aside the 186 square miles to be settled by the mixed-blood descendants of the Sauk (also known as the Sac) and Fox Indian tribes. Legitimate claimants were hard to find, and an army of swindlers and con men descended upon the open prairie, where the lots were the subject of near-constant litigation.
Galland and his employer had sufficient claim to convince Joseph Smith to negotiate a land purchase from his jail cell in, of all places, Liberty, Missouri. In 1839, Smith bought 20,000 acres of land on the Iowa shore of the Mississippi as well as 700 acres in the center of a town across the river called Commerce, Illinois. Galland was a scamp and Commerce was a swamp, with one stone house and five other structures nearby. But the site had promise. The broad limestone flat sat in the middle of a sweeping, graceful horseshoe bend in the river, giving the town waterfront access on its southern, western, and northern borders. Moving east, there was plenty of room to grow, especially toward a line of bluffs and higher ground rising to the fertile prairie beyond.
“No man of understanding can come up the
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