The Story of the Caleb F. Davis Collection

As a good place to begin this documentary collection, here is the story of how, with the help of several people a few years ago, I happened to become aware of and was soon able to make use of the Caleb F. Davis volumes, History of Keokuk, compiled in the late nineteenth century. In addition to containing many very interesting and important journals, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other items relating especially to the Mississippi River town of Keokuk, Iowa, this massive bound scrapbook also has incidentally preserved many materials relating to Nauvoo, Illinois, as well as the general character of people there and their affairs in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois during and shortly after the lifetime of Joseph Smith (1805–1844). Many of these materials will be new to most historians. While this ten-volume collection has been available on a marginal-quality microfilm since 1976, the originals are now open for examination and historical assessment in the research center of the State Historical Society of Iowa in Des Moines.

In September 2015, my son Gregory, who lives in Des Moines, called to tell me that he had two tickets for BYU-Nebraska football game. I arranged to go, and we were very glad to witness the victorious finale of that game and to be in the crowd shown on ESPN. But more than that, I also used that trip to speak to a gathering of BYU alums and local members of the J. Reuben Clark Law Society in Des Moines on the Thursday evening before the game, and then to do some research in the State Historical Society of Iowa library in Des Moines on Friday. While the football game was certainly memorable, what I found in the Iowa libraries was even more exciting.

At first, I was simply interested in tracking down biographical details regarding people mentioned in the newly acquired manuscripts of a lawsuit brought by Joseph Smith against George Hinkle, a former associate of Joseph Smith in Missouri. Hinkle’s actions in the siege of Far West contributed significantly to the incarceration and criminal accusations brought against over a hundred leading Latter-day Saints.¹ By 1841, it turns out, Hinkle had moved to Iowa and was living six miles west of Fort Madison and a bit north of Keokuk. Perhaps he and Laban Fleak had previously gotten to know each other in Missouri, since Fleak and Hinkle were commanders in Missouri militias. Both of them moved at about the same time to the newly available lands in Lee County, Iowa.

Following the arrest of Hinkle by Hawkins Taylor (see pp. 103 below), Joseph had learned of Hinkle’s whereabouts and in 1841 brought a legal action in assumpsit against him in the territorial court of Iowa in Fort Madison, up the river from Nauvoo. I knew this much when I flew to Des Moines, but I wanted to know more about this lawsuit by Joseph Smith. Who was the judge? What could be learned about Joseph’s lawyers in this case? Did anyone remember George Hinkle in Iowa? And who was Sheriff Hawkins Taylor?

As I spent all of Friday in the State Historical Society of Iowa library in Des Moines, I was one of the few patrons there, and several of the librarians bent over backwards to help me. I was amazed at what they helped me find. I quickly learned a lot about Hawkins Taylor and several impressive, courageous, and very highly regarded jurists. Judge Mason, for example, became the first chief justice of the Iowa Supreme Court when Iowa gained statehood in 1846.²

Recollections of Joseph’s lawyers were found in early histories of the Iowa bar. Hugh T. Reed (or Reid),³ who went to Carthage as one of Joseph’s three Iowa lawyers in June 1844, when Joseph and Hyrum were held and murdered there, is remembered as one of the leading lawyers of Fort Madison, and a man of character and wealth.⁴ He was a law partner of Edward Johnstone.⁵

As far as George Hinkle was concerned, in a recollection published in the Annals of Iowa in 1872, Sheriff Hawkins Taylor remembered that in the first election under the territorial organization in Lee County as Taylor was campaigning for a seat in the territorial House of Representatives, he stayed a night in the home of “old man Hinkle’s” in the “Half-Breed Tract.” Although Hawkins Taylor was nearly starving, Hinkle—who was a new settler, with a large family but also with apparent means—was remembered as having offered his guest only a skimpy dinner and breakfast of milk and cornbread, though it must be said that this may have been another man named Hinkle or a misplaced memory from a later campaigning event.⁶

As for Hawkins Taylor, I was shown a lengthy typescript by John Stuekerjuergen of an autobiography Hawkins Taylor had apparently written in 1872. The original manuscript of this lengthy document remains missing. The sixty foolscap pages of the typescript weave into its narratives 179 different people, including such notables as Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Iowa Governor Robert Lucas, Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs, Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, William (Bill) Smith, Bishop George Miller, Brigham Young, as well as many lawyers, judges, criminals, desperados, public officials, and others with whom Sheriff Hawkins Taylor had contacts. Included are some high-drama pursuits on horseback, heated arguments over land transactions, and his observations of the Nauvoo Temple and of baptisms for the dead being performed in the Mississippi River. Also included in this document is a recollection by Sheriff Hawkins Taylor (on page 103 below) of his daring attempt to arrest George Hinkle.

During the next six months, I tried to find the original manuscript of this long Hawkins Taylor autobiography. I was told by an archivist in Des Moines that it might be included in a collection of historical materials about the history of Keokuk, held in a safe deposit box in the Keokuk Savings Bank. I contacted one bank officer and the bank trustee in charge of these documents, and he eventually told me that, rather than having me come to Keokuk to examine the Caleb F. Davis Collection at the bank, he had decided that it was time to donate these ten volumes to the State Historical Society of Iowa research center at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Once that donation had been processed, I arranged to spend two days there, again with my son Greg’s assistance, on March 25–26, 2016, turning all of the pages in this leather-bound scrapbook. It is now open for study there. Working directly with these beautiful volumes opens their extensive contents to clearer understanding, and we were allowed to photograph any of its pages for research and historical publication purposes.

This collection contains much material about the history of Keokuk and Lee County, Iowa, in the mid-nineteenth century. While most of its contents was gathered in the 1870s and 1880s, these items preserve vivid memories of people who experienced the early years of Iowa Territory and Iowa statehood. All ten volumes were assembled by or under the direction of Caleb F. Davis, a prominent citizen of the river town of Keokuk. Latter-day Saints might think of him as the Andrew Jenson of Lee County, as Davis solicited reminiscences from lots of people, who submitted them or had them copied for inclusion in these volumes, often in elegant handwriting.

For example, volumes 1 and 10 offer extensive personal statements about Chief Keokuk (the namesake of the Iowa town along the Mississippi River), about indigenous peoples’ relations with settlers in the 1830s in southern Iowa, as well as about the various Keokuk city council elections, and various financial reports. Volume 8 contains documents, minutes, news articles, and information about the several churches in Keokuk, including the Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Jews, Catholics, Baptists, and Latter-day Saints (generally referred to as Mormons).

At the end of volume 8, about thirty pages of newspaper clippings are found, relating to Mormons in Nauvoo, Keokuk, and Fort Madison. These articles appeared in local and also in regional newspapers in Iowa and Illinois. Two of those articles are by A. N. Harlan about his visits to Nauvoo; and another report submitted by Judge Edward Johnstone quotes from and tells about the events surrounding a request from Joseph Smith on June 23, 1844. Joseph asked him to go to Carthage on the legal team representing Joseph and the Nauvoo City Council, who had been indicted on charges of riot, as they had carried out the council’s legal order to abate the public nuisance that had been recently caused by the Nauvoo Expositor.

Volumes 2–7 contain over 460 autobiographical entries, photographs, and historical records, as are listed on the table of contents for each of these ten volumes. One such item is a picture of Hawkins Taylor, along with his signature on a promissory note issued by the City of Keokuk in 1857. Included also is information and a photograph of the land tycoon Isaac Galland, as well as personal statements by Jasper Mason Kimball, who remembered when he was a boy in the camps of the Mormons leaving Nauvoo, singing songs and being happy in the face of severe hardships. The long history printed below of Laban B. Fleak, a resident of Keokuk, contains his statement that the news of the killings of Joseph and Hyrum Smith was “glorious news” and that no news ever received “gave as much joy to him and his wife, as did this” (p. 346).

But regarding my quest to find the original manuscript of the long autobiography by Hawkins Taylor, I was disappointed. While it is true that volume 3, pages 43–63, contains a shorter and similar autobiographical statement, which appears to be written in Hawkins Taylor’s own handwriting, the two documents are not the same. Thus, both versions of his life history are included in the present volume, and it would appear that this shorter version was written later, probably in the late 1880s, when Davis was assembling his history of Keokuk and during the time when Hawkins Taylor was living and working in Washington D.C. The short version focuses mainly on Taylor’s challenges and activities in Keokuk when he served there as county sheriff and then as mayor.

But in one area, in particular, it was intriguing to note where the short and long autobiographies do overlap—in Hawkins Taylor’s description of the border war that broke out between Missouri and Iowa in December 1839. As I began going through the early Iowa documents my first day in Des Moines, I kept running into references to the “Missouri War.” At first, I wondered what these oblique references were all about, thinking that they might have something to do with the Mormon Missouri War, especially when the name of Governor Boggs popped up often these Iowa accounts. As it turns out, Hawkins Taylor played an important role in diffusing this very volatile border dispute, which almost led to all-out armed conflict between the militias of Governor Boggs and Governor Lucas. The story of this Missouri-Iowa Border War has often been told but only from the Iowa side, and so it has not been related to or compared with the use of military force to expel the Mormons from Missouri just one year earlier in 1838–1839, which also occurred in the dead of winter.

I am particularly grateful to Becki Plunkett, Special Collections Archivist in Des Moines, and to Mary J. Bennett, the Special Collections Coordinator of the State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City, as well as to several others during my subsequent visits to the Keokuk and Fort Madison public libraries, for their always prompt and enabling professional assistance. John Stuekerjuergen’s diligent gathering and preservation of Hawkins Taylor materials has also been especially invaluable.

While the Caleb F. Davis Collection is now available in Des Moines for physical inspection for the first time, its content has been somewhat accessible to researchers in its entirety for almost fifty years. The Keokuk Public Library acquired in 1975 a complete set of images of the scrapbooks on three microfilm reels that were filmed by Smith Title Services; and researchers have used those microfilms for research, for example on the Joseph Smith Papers Journals, and thus the scrapbooks are included in the Works Cited list on the Joseph Smith Papers website. But until 2016 the original volumes were not available for direct examination. Reflecting the value of these materials, some historical notes by a couple of authors have also referred to the Caleb F. Davis scrapbooks. Fortunately, they are now available for more comprehensive use. Given the fact that many items contained in this collection are late recollections, however, one must allow for the possibility of a not insignificant inaccuracy rate in those various reminiscences. For further references, see the bibliography at the end of this volume.