BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY The Evening and the Morning Star: Extra. Kirtland, Ohio, February, 1834. [Kirtland, 1834]
Broadside 32 x 24.5 cm.
The Star Extra reprints the Missouri handbill (whose existence is inferred from several contemporary sources) together with two editorial comments by Oliver Cowdery. Its main text, entitled “The Mormons” So Called, is signed by Parley Pratt, Newel Knight, John Carrill [Corrill], and dated December 12, 1833. It recounts the events leading up to the destruction of the Star office, the agreement of the Saints to leave Jackson County by April 1, 1834, and their violent expulsion in November 1833. This account largely agrees—at a number of points word for word—with that in Parley Pratt’s 1839 work entitled History of the Late Persecution, suggesting that Parley actually wrote the handbill and used it five years later in composing his book. (See this digital collection for the 1840 edition of this work entitled Late Persecution of the Church of Jesus Christ, of Latter Day Saints ).
Pratt, Knight, and Corrill were among the ten high priests chosen “to wa[t]ch over” the ten Missouri branches by a Church council on September 11, 1833. Knight and his father Joseph, Sr., were associated with Joseph Smith as early as 1827. Born in Marlborough, Vermont, September 13, 1800, Newel moved with his family to Bainbridge, New York, in 1809, and then to Colesville two years later. David Whitmer baptized him into the church in May 1830. In May 1831 he moved with the Colesville branch to Ohio, and three months later he led the Colesville Saints into Missouri. He was a member of the first high council in Missouri and a member of the high councils at Far West and Nauvoo. He evacuated Nauvoo with George Miller’s company in 1846, and on January 11, 1847, he died at the Ponca Indian reservation in northern Nebraska.
John Corrill was born in Worcester County, Massachusetts, September 17, 1794. He encountered Oliver Cowdery in Ohio in the fall of 1830 and was baptized into the Church the following January. On June 3, 1831, he was ordained an assistant to Bishop Edward Partridge, a position he held until November 7, 1837. In 1838 he was elected to the Missouri state legislature from Caldwell County. That fall Corrill began to distance himself from the Church leaders, and in November he testified for the state at Joseph Smith’s trial before Austin A. King. The following March he was excommunicated. He died in Quincy, Illinois, September 6, 1843. Yet his book A brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints (Commonly Called Mormons) Including an Account of Their Doctrine and Discipline; with the Reasons of the Author for Leaving the Church (St. Louis, 1839) was inoffensive enough for The Prophet to advertise it for much of its run.
Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church. Volume One, 1830-1847. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, [1997]). Item 10, p. 42-43.
Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University