At Nauvoo I found Sidney Rigdon busy among the Saints, trying to establish his claim to the presidency of the Church. He was first Counselor to the Prophet Joseph at the time of the latter's death. The Church was fourteen years old, and he claimed that it was its privilege and duty to appoint a guardian; and he wished the people to sanction his guardianship.
I was much dissatisfied with the course he was taking, and as I could not sustain him, I felt to leave Nauvoo for a season. I went into the country, where I had left my wife and two children with my sister Melissa. When I met my sister, she threw her arms around my neck and thanked the Lord that I had returned. She had seen an account of a man being drowned in the Ohio River, and, from the description, thought that it might have been me.
On the 8th of August, 1844, I attended a general meeting of the Saints. Elder Rigdon was there, urging his claims to the presidency of the Church. His voice did not sound like the voice of the true shepherd. When he was about to call a vote of the congregation to sustain him as President of the Church, Elders Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt and Heber C. Kimball stepped into the stand.
Brigham Young remarked to the congregation: "I will manage this voting for Elder Rigdon. He does not preside here. This child" (meaning himself) "will manage this flock for a season." The voice and gestures of the man were those of the Prophet Joseph.
The people, with few exceptions, visibly saw that the mantle of the Prophet Joseph Smith had fallen upon Brigham Young. To some it seemed as though Joseph again stood before them.
I arose to my feet and said to a man sitting by me, "That is the voice of the true shepherd—the chief of the Apostles."
Our enemies, finding that the death of the Prophet did not break up "Mormonism," as they had expected, began their persecutions again, by burning the houses of the brethren in the outlying settlements.
I joined a company of minute men to assist in protecting the Saints. In one of our scouts we visited Carthage. I examined the jail in which Joseph and Hyrum were assassinated. I noticed that the latches on the two doors that the mob broke in, when they killed the Prophets, had been rendered useless by bending down the catches, so that the latches would clear them. All the entrances to the prison yard appeared to me to have been prepared beforehand for the easy admittance of the mob.
The blood on the floor where the Patriarch fell, had left a black spot about the size and shape of the body. The ball holes in the plastering about the window out of which Joseph leaped, and those in the door and in the wall above where Hyrum had lain, and also where John Taylor had been shot at, denoted that the assailants were desperadoes and well prepared for their work.
When the District Court sat in Hancock County, the judge allowed one of the leaders of the mob to act as an official. He also professed to try to have the murderers indicted, but as several of them were on the grand jury, there were no indictments found against them.