The Life of Joseph Smith, the Prophet

by George Q. Cannon

As a rational man, you must give up the claim that Joseph Smith is a prophet and an inspired man; the Twelve are scattered all over creation; let them come here if they dare: if they do, they will be murdered. As that revelation cannot be fulfilled, you must now give up your faith. This is like all the rest of Joseph Smith's damned prophecies.

Elder Turley rebuked them with such manliness and power of the Spirit that John Whitmer, one of the apostates who was present, hung his head in shame.

But the Lord God Almighty would not permit one jot or tittle of His promise to fail; He had servants with the courage and fidelity to perform His command. At 1 o'clock in the morning of the 26th day of April, 1839, the day promised in the revelation, seven of the Twelve Apostles, a majority of the quorum, held a conference on the temple site at Far West; and the master workman laid a corner stone of the foundation of the Lord's house. After the inspiring services were ended, the Twelve took leave of the congregation of the Saints, as had been promised.

It was at this conference that Wilford Woodruff and George A. Smith were ordained to the Apostleship. Brigham Young presided over the meeting and John Taylor was its clerk.

President Brigham Young, in speaking of this matter in his history, details the following incident:

As the Saints were passing away from the meeting, Brother Turley said to Page and Woodruff, "Stop a bit, while I bid Isaac Russell good-bye;" and knocking at the door called Brother Russell.

His wife answered, "Come in, it is Brother Turley."

Russell replied, "It is not; he left here two weeks ago," and appeared quite alarmed; but on finding it was Turley, asked him to sit down; but he replied, "I cannot; I shall lose my company."

"Who is your company?" inquired Russell.

"The Twelve."

"The Twelve!"

"Yes. Don't you know that this is the twenty-sixth, and the day the Twelve were to take leave of their friends on the foundation of the Lord's House, to go to the islands of the sea? The revelation is now fulfilled, and I am going with them."

Russell was speechless, and Turley bid him farewell.

Thus was this revelation fulfilled, concerning which our enemies said, if all the other revelations of Joseph Smith were fulfilled, that one should not, as it had day and date to it.

After the fulfillment of this prophecy, none of the Saints had any desire to remain longer in the state of Missouri, and the last remnant, except such as were held in chains and dungeons hastened away to join their brethren in Illinois and to find a new place of gathering. And a few months later, after undergoing thrice the tortures of death, Parley P. Pratt and the other captives had all been released.

The turbulent spirits in Missouri had conquered, overriding law and justice and trampling humanity into the dust. This is not the place for a review in detail of all the sufferings of the Church of Jesus Christ in that region; but when the chapter shall be written, it will be as tragic as anything in American history.

The edict of exile was made and enforced, and so far as the Saints were concerned, the deed ended there; but not so with the state of Missouri, for the wrong committed remained to plague and wreak its vengeance upon guilty and innocent alike. The demon conjured into power by the murderous and plundering element of that region, would not down. When there were no "Mormons" to persecute, the turbulent spirits of the border at times fell upon each other and at other times fell unitedly upon law-abiding, prosperous citizens. Missouri became deeply involved in the Kansas troubles, in which the lawless, mobocratic element took bloody part; and when the Civil War opened, the government of Missouri, from the executive office down, became a chaos. The man who occupied the place disgraced by Lilburn W. Boggs, was a secessionist, and fled from his capital to lead the state militia at Booneville against the Union troops. The national power triumphed, and the governor and his forces, among which were many of the old mobocrats, were utterly routed. The offices which had once been disgraced by cowards were now declared vacant by an arbitrary decree of a state convention in sympathy with the Republic, one and indivisible. The state was declared out of the Union by the secessionist governor, and then became the theatre for a fratricidal strife which deluged it with blood.

On the 31st day of August, 1861, General John C. Fremont, then in command of the western department, declared martial law in the state of Missouri, and proclaimed free the slaves of all persons who had taken up arms against the United States. It was a wonderful retribution that Missouri, in which the mob had declared as a pretext for their assaults upon the Saints that the latter were Abolitionists, should be the first state in which an edict of manumission went forth. It is also a wonderful retribution that the state in which the civil power had once been helpless to protect law-abiding citizens, should, only five months after the breaking out of the war, have its civil power abrogated and all its people placed under martial rule. Some of the statements in Fremont's proclamation show with startling significance the character of that evil population which had been rewarded by the state for expatriating the Latter-day Saints.