Part Four: Iowa Stake Documents

Latter-day Saints started gathering in Lee County, Iowa Territory, in early 1839 as they were driven from Missouri. About forty families found refuge in the abandoned army barracks from Old Fort Des Moines, located in Montrose, Iowa. This was where many of the miraculous healings occurred during the summer of 1839 malaria epidemic.¹

While most Latter-day Saints would end up at a city across the river, originally named Commerce but renamed Nauvoo by the gathering Saints, there continued to be a significant congregation in Lee County, Iowa. Most would settle in and around Montrose, Iowa, a town on the Mississippi almost directly across the river from Nauvoo. The Saints eventually established several towns in the area; Nashville was located just below Montrose, Zarahemla just above, and Ambrosia to the northwest.² Other Latter-day Saint settlements dotted Lee County, but none had the concentration of Latter-day Saints that this area had. As this document reports, the Church was officially organized in Lee County on October 5, 1839. First, the term “branch” was used to discuss this organization, but by August 7, 1841, it was known as the Iowa Stake.

The Iowa Stake would be disbanded in 1842. The inclusion of these Church records and documents help to make sense of some of the events in the Iowan documents kept by those antagonistic to the Church. Several of the key documents in this collection, such as the autobiographies, were written much after the events they recorded. Others, such as the letters, were written contemporaneously to the events they recorded, but many were not very full and detailed. Many of the documents from the Iowa Stake were minutes or records of meetings and church proceedings, meaning they were written closely to the events they recorded.

In some ways, the Iowa Stake documents challenge some of the claims of anti-Mormons in Iowa. In other ways, they confirm some of the problems that anti-Mormons like Kilbourne accused the Latter-day Saints of. The Iowa Stake documents reveal messy relationships between members who accused each other of not following the Word of Wisdom, of physical violence, of sexual assault, of theft, and more. Considering that many of these were actions that Kilbourne also accused Latter-day Saints of committing, the minutes confirm that these were problems among Iowan Saints.

These documents thus reveal both the hopes and aspirations that Latter-day Saints had for Iowa during the Nauvoo period and hint at why those were unfulfilled. Included are the Iowa Stake minutes, which were kept from October 1839 to August 1841. Additionally, we included “A Record of the Proceedings of the Lesser Priesthood in the Territory of Iowa,” which was kept only during the summer of 1841. We also included the minutes of a conference held in Zarahemla in January 1842, which appears to have been when the Iowa Stake was officially dissolved. And finally, we included the minutes of the meetings of the Nashville Branch, which were kept from December 1840 to October 1843. These minutes show that despite the Iowa Stake being dissolved, the branch was not, and members continued to live in Iowa. Additionally, the minutes from the Nashville Branch, perhaps more than the Proceedings of the Lesser Priesthood or the Iowa Stake minutes, give depth to the complicated relationships between Latter-day Saints in Iowa. William A. Hickman, referred to by the anti-Mormons in Iowa as “Wild Bill” Hickman, appears frequently in these minutes, threatening and assaulting fellow members. Additionally, the Nashville minutes include the record of an elder, whose name was redacted when the Church History Library digitized the document, sexually assaulting an eleven-year-old girl.

We include the documents for a fuller, more accurate depiction of Latter-day Saints in Iowa during the Nauvoo period. Although Taylor, Fleak, and Kilbourne very likely exaggerated many of their negative portrayals of Latter-day Saints, these minutes reveal that some of the issues these anti-Mormons had with their Latter-day Saint neighbors were rooted in real problems that seemed particularly prominent among Iowan Saints, such as alcohol consumption, theft, land disputes, and physical violence.