Professor Peter Coviello

So they take all that with them into the West.

Yes, he's assassinated in a prison.

You can still go to Carthage, Illinois.

And the Mormons are not wrong.

This is anticipating where we're going in the 1850s.

The Mormons surely cannot be blamed for thinking of themselves as persecuted and as persons that the state and elements of the state are free to murder.

They had executed Joseph Smith.

There had been a massacre at Hans Mill, been the extermination order.

So some historians will refer to the Mormons' persecution complex, and I understand where that comes from, but they have some real data to go on in the 19th century.

For sure, yeah.

The state itself had expressed a great willingness –

To massacre the Mormons.

Right.

To the degree that they're even remotely identified with native peoples as fellow exiles from an imperial America, they also understand what extermination looks like.

They also can see their own fates written out in the fate of native peoples.

This is the place.

They found a place that looked habitable and looked like it could hold the saints, the population of Mormons.

But it was also at what for...

For Brigham Young particularly, it was at like a saving distance from the eastern United States and its increasingly apocalyptic tensions.

Of course, we're in the run-up to slavery.