Backenstos, Jacob Benjamin.  Proclamation No [sic] 4. To the citizens of Hancock County, Ill., and the surrounding country. [Signed and dated at the end:] J.B. Backsenstos, Sh’ff, H.C. Ill. Bank of the Mississippi river, near Montebello, Sept. 20th A.D. 1845.[Nauvoo, 1845]
Broadside 41 x 28.5 cm.

Jacob Backenstos, a “Jack Mormon,” had ties to the Saints through his brother William, who was married to a niece of Emma Smith.  Born in Pennsylvania in 1811, Backenstos served as clerk of the Hancock circuit court in 1843 and in August 1844 was elected by the Mormon bloc to the Illinois legislature, where he argued against the repeal of the Nauvoo charter.  The following year he was elected sheriff of Hancock County and was immediately confronted with the violence that ultimately drove the Saints from Illinois.  Fifteen days after Congress declared war with Mexico, he was commissioned a captain of mounted riflemen, and at the battle of Chapultepec he was brevetted a lieutenant–colonel for gallantry and meritorious service.  In 1849 he marched with the mounted riflemen to Oregon, settled with his family in the Willamette Valley, and there resigned his commission in 1851.  On September 25, 1857, he drowned himself in the Willamette River near Portland.

In his capacity as sheriff of Hancock, Backenstos issued five proclamations over a period of twelve days.  All of these were undoubtedly printed by the Times and Seasons print shop, and thus they are included here, even though they are technically not Mormon pieces.

Backenstos’s third and fourth proclamations, summarize his movements from Tuesday, September 16, to Saturday, September 20.  In Proclamation No. 4 Backenstos tells of riding to the southwest part of Hancock on the afternoon of September 18 with two hundred mounted men—Miller’s and Markham’s troops—with the intent of attacking the rioters the next day.  Instead of launching this attack—undoubtedly because of Brigham Young’s request not to make a direct assault—he turned toward Carthage, armed with a number of arrest warrants for the leaders of the rioters, and at sundown he entered the town.  Before his troops could surround Carthage, however, all of those he sought to arrest escaped, except Anthony Barkman, whom he took into custody.  About noon on September 20 Backenstos headed for his rendezvous with J. H. Hale’s company, and en route he learned that the rioters had fled into Missouri.  He reports that, to his knowledge, no houses had been burned since September 16, and therefore, he declares the county at peace.  Included in this proclamation are Backenstos’s letter of September 18 to the rioters asking them to surrender and to give up the state arms, and Levi Williams’s contemptuous reply of September 19.

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 279, p. 321–22.

Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University