Item Detail
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24104
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1
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0
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English
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But for the Kindness of Strangers : The Columbia, Missouri, Response to the Mormon Prisoners and the Jailbreak
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The Missouri Mormon Experience
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Columbia, Mo.
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University of Missouri Press
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119-138
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"The unkind and unlawful treatment of the Mormons in Missouri in the 1830s has been well documented. Except for the civility and fair hand of Alexander Doniphan, a Whig attorney and a brigadier general in the Missouri state militia in a sea of Jacksonian Democrats in the western counties, the Mormons appear to have been utterly friendless. Surely there were other Missourians in that region whose sympathies were similar to Doniphan's, but their names have been lost to the historical record. Thus, among Missourians of the period, the name of Alexander Doniphan stands out because of his keen sense of justice and fair play. All other Missourians, by contrast, have too often been cast in the shadow of the anti-Mormon persecutors in the western counties, whose virulence has been well documented. The truth, of course, is not quite that simple. A case in point is the relatively brief episode of the Mormons in central Missouri in 1839. There, in Columbia, Boone County, Missouri, the Mormon experience was dramatically different from what they had endured in the western counties. This paper describes some of those differences and explores ways to account for them." [p.119]