A people repeatedly misunderstood, targeted, displaced, and denied protection.
This timeline helps visitors see the sequence clearly: suspicion, organized hostility, civil breakdown, forced removal, and legal discrimination. It is designed to show the pattern without exaggeration.
Reading the pattern.
This timeline is not presented to exaggerate. It is presented to clarify.
The purpose is not to collapse every hardship into a single category or to treat all injustices as identical. The purpose is to show that the persecution of Latter-day Saints was real, repeated, and historically significant — and that it often followed a recognizable sequence: public suspicion, organized opposition, civil breakdown, forced removal, and legal pressure.
Early opposition and organized hostility
Opposition begins early
Hostility toward the early Saints began before the Book of Mormon was even published. Opposition emerged in New York and Pennsylvania and intensified as the Church grew, including ridicule, published attacks, harassment, and efforts to disrupt the work from the beginning.
Jackson County violence and expulsion
In Jackson County, Missouri, tensions around religion, culture, migration, and political influence escalated into organized violence. Citizens organized against the Saints, intimidation increased, and many were driven from their homes. This was one of the earliest major expulsions and set a pattern that would continue.
Missouri and the collapse of protection
The Missouri conflict deepens
By 1838, conflict in Missouri had escalated into widespread fear, vigilante action, and breakdowns in civil order. Threats, violence, and repeated failures to protect Latter-day Saint communities defined the period.
The Missouri Extermination Order
Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued the order declaring that Latter-day Saints must be treated as enemies and be “exterminated or driven” from the state if necessary for the public peace. It remains one of the clearest examples of state power turned against a religious people in American history.
Hawn’s Mill Massacre
Just three days after the extermination order, an armed mob attacked the Latter-day Saint settlement at Hawn’s Mill. Fourteen men and three boys were killed and many others were wounded.
Forced expulsion from Missouri
In the aftermath of the violence, Latter-day Saints were forced to leave Missouri. Families who had already endured attacks, fear, and loss were compelled to abandon homes, land, and property. They did not simply relocate. Many were driven out.
Nauvoo, martyrdom, and another exodus
The Saints gather in Illinois and build Nauvoo
After fleeing Missouri, many Latter-day Saints gathered in Illinois and began building Nauvoo as a place of refuge and recovery. It became a center of community, worship, and rebuilding after expulsion.
Joseph and Hyrum Smith are killed at Carthage Jail
While awaiting trial in Carthage, Illinois, Joseph and Hyrum Smith were attacked by an armed mob. Both were killed in the jail. Their deaths marked a major moment of mob violence against Church leadership and intensified instability.
Pressure and violence continue around Nauvoo
After the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, violence and organized pressure continued around Nauvoo. Hostility toward the Saints did not end with the martyrdom. It carried forward into renewed efforts to force the community out.
Departure from Nauvoo begins
The Saints had hoped for a more orderly spring departure, but growing hostilities forced them to begin leaving Nauvoo during winter conditions. Thousands departed under pressure in what became another major exodus.
The trek west
The westward journey from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake Valley unfolded in two major segments, first across Iowa to the Missouri River in 1846 and then onward to the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847. The trek is often remembered for faith and endurance; it should also be remembered as a journey made necessary by repeated displacement.
Federal suspicion and legal discrimination
The Utah War
Tension and miscommunication between Latter-day Saints in Utah Territory and officials of the United States government led to the Utah War. Many Saints feared they would once again be driven from their homes, recalling the persecutions they had already experienced in Missouri and Illinois.
Federal anti-bigamy legislation begins
Congress passed federal anti-bigamy legislation aimed at Utah Mormons, marking the beginning of an extended era in which hostility was expressed through federal law as well as public rhetoric.
Legal pressure intensifies
Federal pressure increased through later anti-polygamy laws, including the Edmunds Act and the Edmunds-Tucker Act. These measures intensified the legal campaign and deepened the sense that Latter-day Saints were being treated as a religious problem to be controlled.
The Manifesto
President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto, publicly declaring that the Saints should refrain from marriages forbidden by the law of the land. This marked a major turning point, though the broader era of suspicion and pressure did not vanish overnight.
Memory, recognition, and the unfinished lesson
Missouri formally rescinds the extermination order
Nearly 138 years after Governor Boggs issued the order, Missouri Governor Christopher S. Bond formally rescinded it. The rescission did not erase what happened, but it publicly acknowledged that the order had no place in a just society.
The warning still stands
The forms of hostility may change, but the early stages of injustice remain recognizable: distortion, ridicule, suspicion, and the erosion of public sympathy. That is why this history still matters. It is not only about the past. It is about learning to recognize the pattern before it hardens again into exclusion, discrimination, or harm.
The history of injustice was not one isolated event. It was a sequence.
A people were mocked.
Then feared.
Then opposed.
Then expelled.
Then regulated.
Then remembered too little.
This timeline matters because moral memory matters. When the public forgets how persecution develops, it becomes easier to overlook its early signs.
Learn the history before the pattern is forgotten again.
Explore the deeper history, read the primary documents, and see why remembering injustice against Latter-day Saints is part of protecting fairness in the present.