The Missouri Persecutions — Themes and Context

A Contested Landscape: Far West as Symbol

Roberts's description of Far West in 1888 is deliberately spare: a farm, a dilapidated farmhouse, an excavation, and corner stones. He explicitly rejects the romantic ruins of Babylon or Rome, insisting that the sadness here comes from blighted hopes rather than broken columns. This choice of imagery—absence rather than decay—underscores his argument that the saints were prevented from building, not merely displaced.

He then quotes Crosby Jackson's history of Caldwell County, which attributes Far West's fate to "bigotry and intolerance of the saints towards the gentiles and dissenters." Roberts immediately counters this explanation, promising to show whether it was saintly intolerance or "brutal savagery of pretended Christians" that drove the exodus. The passage thus establishes a central tension: the same landscape is read by different observers as evidence of sectarian conflict or religious persecution.

The High Council and the Liquor Question

A brief but revealing episode occurs in September 1837: non-members wanted to open saloons in Far West and asked church members to sell intoxicants on commission. The High Council resolved not to sustain any member who became a retailer of spirituous liquors, and the liquor business was dropped. Roberts presents this as a straightforward exercise of church discipline, but it also illustrates the kind of community regulation that outsiders might resent. The detail is notable because it is one of the few concrete actions by the saints that Roberts includes before the narrative turns to conflict. He does not comment on whether this decision provoked hostility, leaving the reader to weigh its significance.

Joseph Smith’s 1837 Mission and the Decision to Gather

In October 1837, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon arrived in Far West on a mission to locate new stakes of Zion. A council of the priesthood decided that there was sufficient room near Far West for gathering saints from abroad, so no new stakes were needed. Roberts reports this decision without elaboration, but it marks a pivotal moment: the church leadership chose to concentrate settlement rather than disperse. This concentration would soon become a liability as hostility mounted. The passage also shows Roberts's method of weaving official church actions into the broader narrative, treating them as historical events rather than doctrinal pronouncements.

Roberts's preface warns that later opponents justify present opposition by insinuating that the church was driven out for overt acts against government or American institutions. His response is not to argue but to present a detailed narrative, trusting that the facts will speak for themselves. Readers should attend to the specific incidents he chooses to include—the liquor decision, the temple excavation, the gathering policy—and consider how each functions as evidence in his implicit case. The book is best read as a partisan document that nevertheless provides a wealth of primary-source material for understanding early Mormon-Missouri relations.

I finished The Missouri Persecutions feeling quiet, the way certain histories sit long after the page closes. The weight of those years in Missouri—their faith held through violence, their stories kept by one careful voice—stayed with me. It reminded me of old war logs, lives preserved against forgetting, like in American Prisoners of the Revolution — A Reader’s Guide. Both left me feeling their footprints.