SOS, Missouri - State Archives: Featured Collection - Missouri Mormon War

SOS, Missouri - State Archives: Featured Collection - Missouri Mormon War: "The Missouri Mormon War

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In the 1830s, “Mormonism” commanded center stage in Missouri politics. Joseph Smith and the church he founded in New York State in 1830 quickly gained converts, attracting considerable attention throughout the northeastern United States. Originally named the Church of Christ, it subsequently became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Believers were referred to as “Mormons” because of the church’s adherence to “The Book of Mormon,” a companion scripture to the Bible that Smith claimed to have translated, wherein the story of Jesus Christ appearing to the ancestors of the Native Americans was told.

That same year, Smith dispatched a handful of missionaries to Missouri’s western border to preach the “restored gospel” to the Native American tribes concentrated there. In 1831 Smith proclaimed that God had designated western Missouri as the place where “Zion” would be “gathered” in anticipation of Christ’s second coming. His small band of missionaries soon became a steady stream of converts anxious to establish Zion in Missouri.

Within a few years, the migration and settlement of Latter-day Saints in frontier Missouri led to events that would earn Mormonis"