Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [9]
He made it to the window, then two shots hit him and he fell outward, to the waiting mob. One of the men in the crowd picked Joseph up and propped him against a well curb, a few feet from the jail. A militia colonel ordered four men to shoot him. They stood about eight feet from Joseph, and at the same moment, they fired their bullets through his heart. Joseph Smith fell on his face, and his blood poured into the land of the country whose secret history he had once tried to divine. He lay there for a long time alone, dying.
He was no blood relation, but I feel more kinship to Joseph Smith—the damnation he feared, and the long-coming doom that finally swallowed him—than I do any of my true forebears. I feel for him as a brother.
THE KILLING OF JOSEPH SMITH WAS MEANT TO END MORMONISM, but instead, it changed its course. Within a few months of the assassination the surviving church rallied around a new prophet and president, Brigham Young—a less visionary theologian than Smith, but a smarter leader and more gifted autocrat. The Mormons remained in Nauvoo for two more years—long enough to make it temporarily the largest city in Illinois. But pressures for the Mormons to move continued and so did the mob assaults, and after Young heard a rumor that federal troops were preparing a campaign to destroy the Saints, he decided that the only way for his people to survive America was to leave it. In February 1846, Young and the Mormons began the long pilgrimage to find a new home beyond the nation’s borders. Eighteen months later, they settled in the Great Salt Lake Basin, in a land that they called Deseret (taken from the Book of Mormon’s term for the honey bee—which is to say, the industrious worker who knew how to work in a like-minded community). This new home was to be, in part, the fulfillment of Joseph Smith’s dream of a Kingdom of God on earth—and, in fact, it became the only religious nation ever established within America’s borders. In this millennial land called Deseret—later to be called Utah—the Mormons would be free from the fearful vigilante armies that had made them, along with the Cherokees, one of the only populations ever to be driven from the United States under the threat of extinction, and in this promised place, they would defend themselves from any oppressors who might follow them.
Shortly after settling in Salt Lake, Brigham Young sent out word that all Saints in any land who could make the journey should migrate to the Great Basin, and help the church establish and populate colonies for its long-awaited empire. This was the decree that brought my mother’s final Mormon forebear, Francis Kerby, into the Utah Valley, where years later, according to one story, he would come face to face with a terrible and disillusioning reality.
Not long ago, I found a microfilmed copy of Francis Kerby’s old handwritten journal (like so many Latter-Day Saints’ chronicles, it has been preserved in the invaluable archives of the Mormon Family History Library, in Salt Lake City). Of all our ancestors, Joseph Kerby (who was my grandmother’s grandfather, on her paternal side) left the most detailed personal record—at least, up to a certain time and place. Kerby was born in 1821, into an aristocratic family of devout, long-standing members of the Church of England, who resided on the Channel Islands, off the coast of France. In 1849, when he was twenty-eight years old, Francis and his wife, Mary LeCornu Kerby, heard the preachings of a Latter-Day Saint missionary, read the Book of Mormon, and converted to the Mormon religion. Kerby’s parents were stunned and outraged, and though they never completely severed their ties with their son, they grew distant from his concerns and would later leave him and his children little or none of their wealth. Almost immediately, Kerby went on to a fairly