The following account is extracted from a family reminiscence recorded by N.J. Thorpe, the daughter of John Jimison, a Mormon pioneer of Northern Missouri. This account was published under the title, "REMINISCENCE OF SISTER N. J. THARPE" in the Journal of History, a publication by the RLDS History Department in 1918.
In the year 1836 my father, John Jimison and family was living in Richland County, Ohio, where they joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
While living there they had six children. From there they went to Missouri with a colony of Saints, and stopped in Ray County. Took some land on Crooked River; raised cattle, hogs, chickens and other stock.
My uncle, Elias Benner, went farther [Haun's Mill area along Shoal Creek in Caldwell County] where he also took some land and for awhile the Saints lived in peace. In the fall of 1838 the persecution began.
One evening an armed mob came and ordered my father out, they told him to get his only horse. They guarded him with their guns to the stable. They said they were going to shoot him if he did not do as they told him, as "they wanted to get all the d- Mormon preachers" (my father was an elder). There was a fence near the stable door and as he got to the door he threw the bridle in and jumped the fence and went zigzag into the brush. They shot at him but missed their aim. My folks had butchered that day and it so happened that there was some of the blood on the rail fence, so they thought that they had hit him and that it was his blood. It was getting toward dark so they never tried to find him to see if he was dead, but returned to the house, some of them, and abused my mother and made awful threats.
Mother heard the shots that were fired at my father and she supposed they had killed him. She could not sleep that night and the next morning hunted for him. She found the horse was gone. It seems they had no mercy on the Mormons, as they were called. This was a cold, frosty night and during that night my father was out without a coat. He was traveling the direction of my uncle's, Elias Benner's, thinking that there he could be safe. In those days there was not any tele- [page 115] phones, and post offices were few and far between, and when he got in the vicinity of Haun's Mill he heard it was worse there, as he met some coming away and heard the news of the fate of my uncle and others in that awful massacre where several were buried in one well.
When he had been told about it he turned back, not knowing what to do nor where to stop. He was gone two days. When he reached home my mother was at her sister's, Barbara Study's. There was trouble all around, but they did not bother father any more that fall, but in February, 1839, the mob came and drove off all our hogs. Father took a wagon and an ox team and put what he could of his belongings in the wagon and started for Illinois.
It rained and snowed most of the way and they were two weeks on the road. The children were sick with colds. The third day my brother Jake who was seven years old fell off the wagon and broke his arm. Father pealed a small hickory tree about the size of the boy's arm, and put the bark around his arm and bound it up, and on they went. It was quite cold and some of the older children had to walk. When the Mississippi was reached they crossed over on a flat boat near Hannibal. There was lots of ice in the river. When they got onto the Illinois side they heard of some of our friends in Mount Sterling, Brown County, so here they stopped. The next June 4, 1839, I was born. ["REMINICSENCE OF SISTER N. J. THARPE," Journal of History, 11 (January, 1918): 114-15.]
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