On November 29, 1838, Major General John B. Clark wrote his final report to Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs reviewing the state militia?s recent operations against the Latter-day Saints. ?The whole number of Mormons killed through the whole difficulty as far as I can ascertain are about forty and several wounded,? while one non-Mormon had been killed.[1] Verifying Clark?s figure presents a challenge. Although Clark, as the commanding officer overseeing the campaign, was interested in total casualties, neither he nor anyone else in the state government had an incentive to record the names of Mormons who died. It was therefore left to the Saints themselves to document their losses of human life.

Although the data is limited, there is some evidence that gender played a role in whether the name of a Mormon who died in Missouri would be recorded. Contemporaneous sources contain the names of twenty-one Latter-day Saints who were killed in Missouri: three at Crooked River on October 25, seventeen at Hawn?s Mill on October 30, and one at the militia occupation of Far West on October 31.[2] These numbers account for only about half of Clark?s total, suggesting that even among the Saints, only some of the names of those killed were recorded. A quick scan of the twenty-one names reveals a common characteristic: all were men or boys who died in armed conflict with anti-Mormon vigilantes. The Saints, immersed as they were in biblical narratives of persecution and martyrdom, quickly identified men who died defending the Saints as martyrs who should be remembered and commemorated.[3]

Latter-day Saint women also died in Missouri, yet their names do not appear in contemporary lists of the dead. For example, in mid-October anti-Mormon vigilantes succeeded in expelling about seventy Latter-day Saint families from De Witt, a small settlement in Carroll County, southeast of Far West. Morris Phelps, a Latter-day Saint who wrote an unpublished history of the 1838 conflict in the early 1840s, recorded that two women died during the exodus from De Witt to Far West. One of the women had recently given birth, while the other was elderly, and both apparently succumbed to the difficult conditions of the forced march. Phelps, however, did not name the women.[4] Other early records mention these women?s deaths, yet the women remain nameless in all them.[5] Incidentally, two accounts written decades later did identify these two women, but only by their last names, and historians have raised questions about the reliability of these identifications.[6]

The example of these two women raises the question as to whether there were other Mormon women and children who similarly died from exposure and displacement, yet were only remembered as nameless statistics. As JI blogger and BYU-Idaho history professor Andrea Radke-Moss has shown, the way Latter-day Saints have narrated the church?s experience in Missouri during the 1830s has focused primarily on the actions of men, thereby relegating the actions of women and children to the margins of the narrative. In Andrea?s words, Snow?s ?story humanizes and feminizes an event [the 1838 Mormon War] that has always been told as a story of male war, male imprisonment, and male victimhood.? Her work and the evidence presented here indicate that the problem often goes back to the original sources themselves. Only by seeking to recover female voices, however incompletely preserved in historical sources, can historians begin the process of telling a more accurate story about the Mormon past.

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[1] Clark to Boggs, 29 Nov. 1838, Mormon War Papers, Missouri State Archives. The non-Mormon militiaman who died was Moses Rowland, who was killed at Crooked River on 25 October 1838. Latter-day Saint Albert Perry Rockwood, writing from Far West, estimated on November 11 that about 30 Mormons had been killed. (Rockwood, Journal, 11 Nov. 1838, CHL.)

[2] Crooked River: David W. Patten, Gideon Carter, and Patterson Obanion. Hawn?s Mill: Hiram Abbot, Elias Benner, John Byers, Alexander Campbell, Simon Cox, Josiah Fuller, Austin Hammer, John Lee, Benjamin Lewis, Thomas McBride, Charles Merrick, Levi N. Merrick, William Napier, George S. Richards, Sardius Smith, Warren Smith, and John York. Far West: William Carey. (See Baugh, ?A Call to Arms,? Appendices H and J; Rockwood, Journal, 3 Nov. 1838, CHL.)

[3] See Grua, ?Memoirs of the Persecuted.?

[4] Morris Phelps, Reminiscences, [8], CHL.

[5] See, for examples, Isaac Leany, Quincy, IL, Affidavit, 20 Apr. 1839, photocopy, Material Relating to Mormon Expulsion from Missouri, 1839?1843, CHL; Daniel Avery, Affidavit, Lee Co., Iowa Territory, 5 Mar. 1840, Mormon Redress Petitions, CHL; John Murdock, Affidavit, 10 Jan. 1840, photocopy, Material Relating to Mormon Expulsion from Missouri, 1839?1843, CHL.

[6] In his autobiography, Zadoc Knapp Judd, who was about ten years old in 1838, wrote that the elderly woman?s surname was Downey and that she had recently migrated from Canada. (Judd, ?Reminiscences of Zadoc Knapp Judd,? 7, CHL.) Similarly, when B.H. Roberts published volume 3 of the History of the Church in 1905, he identified the young woman as Jensen, again without a first name. The base text for this passage was Sidney Rigdon?s 1839 history, published as An Appeal to the American People. Rigdon did not identify the woman?s name. Neither did the church clerks who incorporated Rigdon?s history into the manuscript history, or when the manuscript history was published in the Deseret News in the 1850s as the ?History of Joseph Smith.? It is unknown how Roberts determined that the woman?s name was Jensen. (Roberts, ed., History of the Church, 3:159.)  As historian Alexander Baugh has noted, however, Jensen is a Scandinavian name, and there were no known Scandinavian converts in the church in 1838, casting significant doubt on the reliability of Roberts?s identification. (Baugh, A Call to Arms, 81n109.)