houses threatening them with death & destruction instantly if they did not renounce Joe Smith as a Prophet & the Book of Mormon. Sometime towards the last of the Summer of 1833, they commenced their operations of mobocracy. On account of their priests, by mating in their prejudices against Joseph Smith Senior, as I believe, gangs of them from thirty to sixty, visiting the house of George Bebee, calling him out of his house at the hour of midnight, with many guns & pistols pointed at his breast, beating him most inhumanly with clubs & whips & the same night or night afterwards, this gang unroofed thirteen houses in what was called the Whitmer branch of the church in These scenes of mobocracy continued to exist with unabated fury. Mobs went from house to house, thrusting poles & rails in at the windows & doors of the houses of the saints, tearing down a number of houses, turning hogs, horses &C into corn fields, burning fences &C. Sometime in the month of October they broke into the of S Gi[l]bert & Co. and I marched up with thirty or forty men to witness the scene & found a man by the name of , brickbatting the <​store​> door with all fury, the silks, calicoes & other fine goods entwined about his feet, reaching within the door of the storehouse was arrested & taken before , by seven testimonies & then acquited without delay. The next day the Witnesses were taken before the same man for false imprisonment, & by this one were found guilty & committed to jail. This so exasperated my feelings, that I went with two hundred men to enquire into the affair when I was promptly met by the of the militia, who stated to me that the Whole had been a religious farce & had grown out of a prejudice they had imbibed against said Joseph Smith a man with whom they were not acquainted, I here agreed that the church would give up their arms, provided the said would take the arms from the mob, to this the cheerfully agreed & pledged his honor with that of of , Owen [Samuel C. Owens] & others. This treaty entered into we returned home, resting assured on their honor, that we would not be farther molested. But this solemn contract was violated in every sense of the word. The arms of the mob were never taken away & the militia to my certain knowledge were engaged the next day with the mob ( & not excepted, going from house to house in gangs of from sixty to seventy in number, threatening the lives of women & children if they did not forthwith. In this diabolical scene, men were chased from their houses & homes, without any preparations for theirselves or families, I was chased by one of these gangs across an open prairie five miles without being overtaken & lay three weeks in the woods and [p. 121]