Alexander Wentworth

Summary

Alexander Wentworth was, with Thomas Bedford, one of the two men who shot James Jesse Strang on the dock at Saint James, Beaver Island, on 16 June 1856. He fired a revolver, striking Strang twice. He had earlier been a Mormon in good enough standing to be wounded fighting on the Mormon side at the 1853 battle of Pine River, and by 1856 had married into the Johnson-McCulloch family that led the break with Strang. He surrendered aboard the U.S. steamer Michigan, was released without trial, and — unlike Bedford — is traced for some years afterward: he returned to Beaver Island at least twice as a visitor, working as a fishing and hunting guide, and told Elizabeth Whitney Williams directly that he never regretted the shooting. Nothing about his birth, death, or life after his last recorded visit is established from sources held here. confidence: contested.

History

From Mormon posse to assassin

Wentworth’s documented history on Beaver Island begins on the Mormon side of a conflict, not against it. In July 1853 he was among Sheriff Joshua Miller’s unarmed party sent to summon jurors at the fishermen’s settlement of Pine River, which was ambushed there; the contemporary Northern Islander account lists him among the wounded: “Alexander Wentworth and Lewis Briggs have each a shot hole through the flesh of the left arm.”¹ See Battle of Pine River.

By 1856, according to Quaife, Wentworth was “a young man and something of a dandy” who had married a daughter of Frank Johnson, Dr. H. D. McCulloch’s business partner — tying him by marriage to the leading figures of the faction that had turned against Strang.² Elizabeth Whitney Williams gives a compatible account from the other direction: the girl Wentworth married was “highly educated,” and Strang’s continuing social visits to the couple “became disagreeable to the young wife,” a friction Williams thought “may have been one of the reasons for Wentworth’s shooting the king.”³ Quaife, by contrast, frames Wentworth (with Bedford) as lacking, on his own, “the enterprise and courage unaided to compass the King’s murder,” and credits Dr. Hezekiah D. McCulloch’s estrangement from Strang with supplying the “brain and resolution to bring the thing to pass.”² The two explanations — a personal grievance over his marriage, and recruitment into McCulloch’s wider quarrel with Strang — are not mutually exclusive, and neither source held here reconciles them explicitly.

The shooting

On the evening of 16 June 1856, Wentworth and Bedford shot Strang from behind as he walked toward the Michigan. Strang’s own paper named them four days later: “Wentworth had a revolver, and Bedford a horse pistol, with which he struck him over the head and face, while lying on the ground.”⁴ Quaife’s fuller narrative, drawn from Warren Post’s manuscript testimony, has Wentworth fire first — striking Strang in the head — then fire again, hitting him in the face below the right eye, before Bedford beat him with the pistol butt.⁵ See Assassination of James Strang for the full account and the ways the surviving sources disagree on its details.

Wentworth and Bedford “made no attempt to escape, but surrendered themselves” aboard the Michigan.⁶ Her commander refused to give them up to the Emmet County sheriff and carried them to Mackinac, where they were released within days and never tried.⁷ Williams records that they were jailed about a week, then released quietly at night with the instruction “ask no questions.”⁸ About ten days after the shooting, Wentworth returned to Saint James aboard the Michigan with McCulloch and Bedford and took part in an attempt to “arrest” Mormons in sight.⁹

After 1856

Unlike Bedford, who disappears from the sources held here after mid-1856, Wentworth is traced for some further years through Elizabeth Whitney Williams’s memoir. She recalls that “soon after I was married,” Wentworth — “a fine looking and intelligent man, very quiet in his manner,” known locally as “Alec” — boarded with her household on the island for several weeks as a visitor, guiding other guests to the best fishing streams and duck- and pigeon-hunting grounds. She “often talked with Wentworth about the shooting of Strang, asking him if he had any regrets about what he had done.” His answer, quoted directly: “I have never yet regretted what I did. The Mormon life was bad, and there was no good in it as I can see and I would not live it over again for anything.”¹⁰ Williams records that this was his second such visit, favoring the “Johnson House” at Font Lake — his wife’s old home — and that “after that he never came again and we never heard from him any more.”¹⁰ No later trace of him is established from sources held for this project.

Significance

Wentworth’s trajectory — from a wounded member of the Mormon sheriff’s posse at Pine River in 1853 to one of Strang’s two assassins in 1856 — is a compact illustration of how far the Kingdom’s internal politics had turned in three years. His own later, unequivocal statement to Williams that he did not regret the killing is one of very few direct first-person statements by either assassin held anywhere in this project’s sources.

Open questions

• Which motive predominates — personal grievance over his marriage and Strang’s visits (Williams), or recruitment into Dr. McCulloch’s broader quarrel with Strang (Quaife) — is not resolved from sources held here.
• His wife’s name is not given in any source held here, only that she was a daughter of Frank Johnson.
• Birth, death, and life after his last visit to the island. Williams states plainly that after his second post-1856 visit “we never heard from him any more”; no further trace has been located.
• Whether any charge was ever filed against him for the assassination. No Emmet or Mackinac county record has been located here.

See also

• Assassination of James Strang
• Battle of Pine River
• Thomas Bedford
• James Jesse Strang
• Dr. Hezekiah D. McCulloch
• Elizabeth Whitney Williams

Sources