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The "Old Settler" Religious Culture: Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists—these groups held significant social, economic, and political power among the town-dwelling merchants, judges, and local politicians who led the anti-Mormon opposition. This mainstream Protestant frontier culture valued highly localized, traditional biblical interpretations. They viewed the unique theological tenets of the Latter-day Saints—such as modern revelation, an open scriptural canon, a literal gathering to a physical Zion, and a highly organized, centralized priesthood hierarchy—as a direct and dangerous threat to their established religious way of life and political dominance.

Before the Order: The Systematic Campaign to Destroy the Saints

Prior Expulsions: The Saints had already been forced out of Jackson County (1833) and asked to leave Clay County, leading to the creation of Caldwell County as an exclusive segregated settlement area.

The Foundations of Conflict and the Flight from Jackson County (1831–1833)

Years of unchecked, brutal mob warfare paved the road to the 1838 Extermination Order, designed to completely wipe out the Latter-day Saint population. The trouble began almost as soon as the Saints began gathering in Jackson County, Missouri, in 1831, after Joseph Smith revealed that Independence was destined to be the center place of Zion. Driven by intense faith, thousands of members poured into the county, rapidly buying up vast tracts of land. The original Missouri settlers immediately panicked. They were mostly rough, southern frontiersmen who favored slavery, while the incoming Saints were primarily educated northeasterners with strong anti-slavery sentiments. The Missourians were deeply threatened by the sheer speed of the Mormon migration, realizing that within a few election cycles, the Saints would completely control the local government, courts, and economy. 

The tension turned into open violence in July 1833. Local citizens published a manifesto called the "Secret Constitution," demanding that no more Mormons move to the county and that those already there sell their lands and leave. When church leaders refused, a massive mob attacked the town of Independence, tearing down the church printing office and destroying the press. They seized Bishop Edward Partridge and Charles Allen, dragging them to the public square, where they stripped them and covered them in boiling tar and feathers. By November 1833, the violence escalated into coordinated night raids. Armed mobs swept through the Latter-day Saint settlements along the Blue River, unroofing homes, brutally beating the men, and terrorizing women and children. Governor Daniel Dunklin refused to send the state militia to protect the Saints' civil rights, leaving them completely at the mercy of the mobs. In the dead of winter, over 1,000 Saints were violently driven from their homes across the freezing Missouri River into neighboring Clay County, leaving behind their lands and livestock to be looted and burned. 

The Clay County Exile and the Segregation of Caldwell County (1833–1836)

The citizens of Clay County initially showed kindness to the destitute refugees, providing temporary food and shelter. However, as the Saints realized they could not legally reclaim their Jackson County properties, they began purchasing land and building farms in Clay County instead. By 1836, the same familiar patterns of hostility reemerged. Local residents grew alarmed as the Mormon population swelled with thousands of new converts. Public meetings were held in Liberty, Missouri, where prominent citizens told the Saints that their presence was causing a near-civil war environment, explicitly warning that if they did not leave voluntarily, the bloody mobs would rise again. To prevent an immediate bloodbath, the Saints were forced to abandon their newly built farms, becoming refugees for the second time in three years. 

To prevent permanent warfare, a political compromise was struck in the Missouri legislature in December 1836. Led by Alexander Doniphan, the state decided to segregate the Saints politically by carving out a brand-new, isolated region in northern Missouri called Caldwell County. This land was specifically designated as an exclusive reservation for the Latter-day Saints, with the expectation that they would stay out of the surrounding counties. The Saints accepted this segregation as a chance for peace, quickly founding the boomtown of Far West and establishing over 2,000 farms across the prairie. 

However, the segregation plan carried a fatal flaw: it could not contain the explosive growth of the Church. By 1838, thousands of new Saints arrived from the eastern states and Kirtland, Ohio. Caldwell County was completely full. Believing they had a constitutional right to buy land anywhere it was legally for sale, the Saints began moving across county lines, establishing settlements in Daviess County to the north and Carroll County to the east. To the original Missourians, this expansion represented a direct breach of the segregation agreement and a hostile invasion. The old hatreds and political fears reignited with double the fury.

The Outbreak of War and State-Sanctioned Terror (1838)

By the summer of 1838, Missouri citizens formed heavily armed, rogue militias to force the Saints back into their segregated county or destroy them completely. In Carroll County, a massive mob surrounded the newly established town of De Witt, cutting off all supply lines and starving the families inside for days. When the mob threatened an indiscriminate massacre of every man, woman, and child, the surviving Saints were forced to abandon De Witt, leaving their homes to be burned to the ground. As the refugees fled, the mobs followed, launching hit-and-run terror attacks on outlying farms, tearing off roofs, and forcing terrified families into the wilderness. It was during this period of absolute lawlessness that the most horrific war crimes occurred. Armed mobs routinely targeted vulnerable, isolated homes, subjecting countless Latter-day Saint women to brutal, systemic gang rapes. Many of these women died from the trauma and exposure, while others carried the scars for the rest of their lives. 

To protect their families from being slaughtered, the Saints finally organized their own legal militias to strike back, marching into Daviess County to drive out the mobs and secure food for the starving refugees. This culminated in the Battle of Crooked River, where a state-sanctioned militia under Samuel Bogart—who had been actively kidnapping and torturing Mormon citizens—clashed with the Saints. Bogart’s men retreated, but a few fled straight to the state capital with a massive, fabricated lie, claiming that the Mormons had magnified their numbers, joined forces with regional Native American tribes, massacred Bogart's entire troop, and were actively marching to burn down the capital city of Jefferson City. 

Seizing upon these false reports, Governor Lilburn W. Boggs signed Missouri Executive Order 44 on October 27, 1838. This infamous document granted legal immunity to every murderer and thief in Missouri, stating, "The Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace." 

The bloodbath at Haun’s Mill on October 30 showed exactly what "extermination" meant. A rogue militia of 240 men attacked a small, defenseless settlement. When the men and boys ran into the log blacksmith shop for cover, the militia surrounded the building and shoved their rifle barrels directly through the cracks in the logs, firing completely blind into the crowded room. Thomas McBride, a seventy-year-old veteran of the American Revolution, surrendered his weapon and begged for his life, but a militia member named Jacob Rogers took a corn-cutter scythe and hacked the elderly man to pieces while he was still alive. Inside the blacksmith shop, ten-year-old Sardius Smith hid under the bellows. A militia man named William Reynolds discovered him, placed a musket directly against the boy's skull, and blew the top of his head off, later bragging, "Nits will become lice, and if he had lived, he would have been a Mormon." Seventeen bodies were thrown down a dry well because the survivors were too terrified of the militia returning to give them proper graves. 

Simultaneously, a massive army of over 2,500 state troops surrounded the capital city of Far West. Major General Samuel Lucas demanded immediate surrender. To save the women and children from a total slaughter, Joseph Smith and other leaders gave themselves up. Lucas immediately held a secret, illegal court-martial and ordered a firing squad to execute Joseph and his counselors the next morning in the public square. When General Alexander Doniphan fiercely refused the order—calling it cold-blooded murder—Lucas panicked and decided to march the leaders away in chains to the freezing, filthy dungeon of Liberty Jail. 

With the leaders locked away, Far West was left completely defenseless, and the state militia turned the city into a lawless zone of horror. Soldiers went house to house, systematically raping women in front of their bound husbands and crying children, plundering every home, and forcing the remaining citizens to sign over the deeds to their lands at the point of a bayonet. Over the freezing winter of 1838–1839, the state completely expelled between 10,000 and 12,000 people, turning them into homeless refugees overnight. Families walked hundreds of miles through freezing mud, snow, and ice toward Illinois. Many elderly individuals, pregnant women, and infants died of exposure along the frozen trails, their bodies buried in shallow, unmarked graves. 

The Long Century of Exile and the Final Repeal (1839–1976)

The cruelty did not stop when the Saints crossed the Mississippi River. The state of Missouri spent years trying to finish the job, continuously issuing fraudulent extradition warrants to kidnap Joseph Smith back to Missouri so they could legally execute him. This constant threat of violence followed the Saints into Illinois and directly fueled the mob environment that led to the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith in Carthage Jail in 1844. Even when the Saints were forced to flee the United States entirely and march thousands of miles west to the isolated Salt Lake Valley, Executive Order 44 remained fully active on the books of Missouri. For nearly 138 years, any governor or local militia could technically have used that active executive order to arrest, expel, or harm a Latter-day Saint within Missouri borders without legal consequence.

The long-overdue end to this law finally arrived on June 25, 1976. Missouri Governor Christopher S. "Kit" Bond issued an executive decree formally rescinding Executive Order 44. In his official proclamation, Governor Bond openly stated that the 1838 order had caused deep, unconstitutional suffering and directly violated the fundamental rights of religious freedom. On behalf of all Missourians, he expressed deep, formal regret for the historic injustice, officially welcoming the Latter-day Saints back into the state and closing the darkest chapter of state-sponsored religious persecution in American history. 

Christians killing Christians over theology—what?!?