"After daylight appeared some four or five men, with myself, who had escaped with our lives from this horrid massacre, repaired as soon as possible to the mills to learn the condition of our friends whose fate we had but too truly anticipated.
"When we arrived at the house of Mr. Haun, we found Mr. Merrick's body lying in the rear of the house, and Mr. McBride's in front, literally mangled from head to foot. We were informed by Miss Rebecca Judd, who was an eye-witness, that he was shot with his own gun after he had given it up, and then cut to pieces with a corn-cutter by a man named Rogers, of Davies county, who kept a ferry on Grand River, and who afterwards repeatedly boasted of this same barbarity. Mr. York's body we found in the house. After viewing these corpses we immediately went to the blacksmith's shop, where we found nine of our friends, eight of whom were already dead—the other, Mr. Cox, of Indiana, in the agonies of death, who soon expired."
But to sister Amanda Smith must be given the principal thread of this tragedy, for around her centres the terrible interest of the Haun's Mill massacre, which even to-day rises before her in all the horrors of an occurring scene. She says:
"We sold our beautiful home in Kirtland for a song, and traveled all summer to Missouri—our teams poor, and with hardly enough to keep body and soul together.
"We arrived in Caldwell county, near Haun's Mill, nine wagons of us in company. Two days before we arrived we were taken prisoners by an armed mob that had demanded every bit of ammunition and every weapon we had. We surrendered all. They knew it, for they searched our wagons.
"A few miles more brought us to Haun's Mill, where that awful scene of murder was enacted. My husband pitched his tent by a blacksmith's shop.
"Brother David Evans made a treaty with the mob that they would not molest us. He came just before the massacre and called the company together and they knelt in prayer.
"I sat in my tent. Looking up I suddenly saw the mob coming—the same that took away our weapons. They came like so many demons or wild Indians.
"Before I could get to the blacksmith's shop door to alarm the brethren, who were at prayers, the bullets were whistling amongst them.
"I seized my two little girls and escaped across the mill-pond on a slab-walk. Another sister fled with me. Yet though we were women, with tender children, in flight for our lives, the demons poured volley after volley to kill us.