Expulsion of the Strangites

Summary

Within three weeks of the shooting of James Jesse Strang on 16 June 1856, the entire Mormon population of Beaver Island was removed from it. The departures began voluntarily — Strang himself left on the propeller Louisville on 28 June, and families followed on the Iowa two days later — and ended in early July with an armed party from the mainland ordering the remaining Saints to the harbour on pain of having their houses burned, crowding them aboard whatever steamers came in, and taking possession of their property. Quaife estimates about 2,600 people were driven out; that estimate rests on Strang’s own 1854 census and is contested. The land was afterwards occupied by the fishermen and their successors, and Beaver Island’s Irish Catholic settlement dates from this moment.

History

Sequence

The removal

Quaife’s account, drawn from the church historian Warren Post and from survivors he interviewed in 1918–1920:

Bands of swearing, drunken ruffians went about the island commanding the Mormons to assemble at the harbor for immediate departure, on peril of having their homes burned over their heads. There they were crowded on board steamers, as many as the vessels could carry, and started into exile; up the Lake or down the Lake, it was all the same to the mobbers, who, even before the Saints had left the harbor began the appropriation of their property.³

Named vessels: the Keystone State (which took a load to Chicago), the Iowa, and the Louisville (to Detroit, “all she could stow”).⁶⁷ A contemporary letter records 490 taken to Chicago on a single boat and 300 having gone earlier on the Iowa.⁶ Quaife’s illustrative case is Wingfield Watson, ordered to bring his goods to the harbour within a day although his wife had given birth three days before; the family walked the King’s Highway to the harbour and were put aboard the Keystone State without their cattle or possessions, and landed on a Chicago dock to sit in the July sun for most of a day.⁷

The 1892 Michigan Pioneer sketch is briefer and equally categorical: “a mob of angry fishermen and others descended upon the Mormon settlement, burned the temple, sacked the ‘royal palace,’ and drove the subjects of the fallen monarch from the islands in hot haste. The dispersion of the Beaver island Mormons was complete.”⁸

Quaife names St. Helena Island, near the Straits, as the assembly point for the attacking party, and the Newton brothers — traders there — as prominent in it, quoting a local ballad: “‘Arch Newton now must lead us on, / We’ll sweep the Beavers clean.’”⁹

The other version

Elizabeth Whitney Williams heard the story from her brother Lewis, who was “one of the men chosen the year before to help preserve law and order in the sending away of the Mormons” and who went to the island “to help get the people away on the steamboats that were sent to carry them from the island.” In her telling many Mormons left at once and voluntarily, having means of their own; the scenes at the dock were of grief rather than violence — “Women fainted and were carried on board; children were crying” — and, critically, “All were allowed to take their household goods, yet many did not do so.”¹⁰ The Cleveland Plaindealer, reported in Louisiana on 22 July, likewise described the Mormons as “leaving Beaver Island … en masse, and selling their property for the most they can get.”¹¹

Against her, a New Hampshire paper of 19 July reported: “About ninety Mormons, driven out from Beaver Island, arrived at Chicago last Wednesday, in a state of destitution. Others were landed at Milwaukie and Racine. They were compelled to leave their property behind them.”¹² The number in that paragraph is much smaller than the 490 in Quaife’s source, and may refer to a single arrival; the statement about property is flatly contrary to Williams.

confidence: contested on the character of the removal. Whether it is best described as an expulsion at gunpoint, a panicked voluntary exodus, or both in sequence depends on which witness is preferred; the sources held here support a sequence beginning with voluntary flight and ending in coercion.

The manifesto

The party that took the island printed its own statement on the captured press of the Northern Islander (1850–1856), as an “Extra” retitled Islander Redeemed. The Buffalo Express received a copy and remarked that the slip was “shockingly printed” because “the only means they possess for printing are so rude as scarcely to afford a tangible result,” adding that “the time has come for the redemption of that unfortunate portion of Michigan, and we shall soon receive from there a respectable newspaper, in lieu of the despicable Islander.”⁵

The dominion of King Strang is at an end. The band of marauders, once occupying the Beaver group of islands, under the administration and direction of James J. Strang, their reputed Prophet, have fled at the approach of the Sheriff. The land is redeemed; a kingdom no longer exists upon the borders of one of our most populous States. … It should be matter, therefore, of public rejoicing to all persons living contiguous to the Lakes that this nest of banditti have been exterminated, and we would take this occasion to caution the citizens of Wisconsin against many of them who have fled within her precincts.⁵

The same document accuses Strang of census fraud: “The census returns made for the county of Emmet, under his own hands, show an aggregate population of 7,000, whilst in reality it falls below 1,000.” That allegation is the principal counterweight to the Mormon population figures; see Kingdom of Saint James.⁵

Numbers

Quaife’s estimate of about 2,600 expelled is an extrapolation from the Northern Islander’s report of a census of autumn 1854 showing 2,608 residents on Big Beaver Island. The direct evidence of vessel loads in his sources totals about 790 (490 to Chicago plus 300 on the Iowa) plus the Louisville’s unspecified load.³⁶ confidence: contested.

Aftermath

Quaife records that the exiles scattered — many to the Reorganized Church, some to Utah, most out of Mormonism altogether — and that the church, left without a designated successor, disintegrated. The Michigan historian Byron M. Cutcheon, quoted by Quaife, called the day of the expulsion “the most disgraceful day in Michigan history.”³ The men who took the island stayed: the 1892 sketch notes that they and their successors “are still in possession of the fruits of conquest,” living in the abandoned Mormon cabins, with the office of the Northern Islander converted into “the best hotel” in St. James and Catholicism become the island’s dominant religion.⁸

Significance

The expulsion is the hinge of Beaver Island’s history: it ends the Strang era in a few days, transfers an entire built landscape — cleared farms, hewn-log houses, roads, a sawmill and a printing office — from one population to another, and opens the way for the Irish fishing settlement that has defined the island ever since. It is also the reason the island’s Mormon documentary record is so thin: the press stopped, the files scattered, and the victors wrote the history.

Open questions

• How many people. See above. The figure cannot be settled without the manuscript Michigan state census returns for Emmet County, which this project does not hold.
• Coercion or flight. Quaife and the 1892 sketch describe an armed expulsion; Williams and the Cleveland Plaindealer describe a largely voluntary departure with goods. Both may describe different phases.
• Was the temple burned? The 1892 sketch says the mob “burned the temple”; the Quaife narrative of the mobbing, as read here, does not mention it. No independent contemporary report of the burning has been located in this corpus.
• Where they went. Chicago, Detroit and Wisconsin are attested; no reconstruction of where the exiles settled has been attempted here.
• Property title. How the Mormon land holdings passed to their occupiers is not settled by the narrative sources held here. The now-held BLM General Land Office patents document federal grantees, including an 1849 patent to James J. Strang, but they do not provide the later private conveyances needed to reconstruct how particular Mormon holdings passed to post-1856 occupiers.

See also

• Assassination of James Strang
• James Jesse Strang
• Kingdom of Saint James
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite)
• Northern Islander (1850–1856)
• Elizabeth Whitney Williams
• Beaver Island
• Saint James

Sources