175 years ago today - 1838 30 Oct.

[Joseph Smith] Militia attack the Haun's Mill settlement and murder seventeen men and boys. Thomas McBride, the oldest victim, is "cut to pieces with a corn cutter...literally mangled from head to foot." Sardius Smith, one of the youngest victims, begs for his life from a militiaman who put "his rifle near the boy's head, and literally blowed off the upper part of it." Although her son Sardius and husband are dead, Amanda Barnes Smith is preoccupied with one of her surviving sons, because "the entire hip joint of my wounded boy [Alma] had been shot away." She reports obtaining "a vision" from God about the way to care for the injury and tells her son that "the Lord will make you another hip." She would later write: "It is now nearly forty years ago, but Alma has never been the least crippled during his life."

[Source: Quinn, D. Michael, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, Appendix 7: Selected Chronology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-47, http://amzn.to/origins-power]

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