Joseph Smith Prophesy Fulfilled: God’s Wrath Would Be Poured Out Over Jackson County

(The following post was written by Alma Allred.)

When I first became aware of literature that was critical of Mormonism, I read everything I could put my hands on. I loved to respond to it because it was so easy to respond to dishonest portrayals of my faith. However, after about 15 years of seeing the same canards again and again, I decided one day that I was tired of wading through a literary sewer to defend what was sacred to me.

I determined that as soon as I identified an argument that relied on dishonesty, I would reject the rest of it as not worth my time. Consequently, I read less and less of the genre.

Recently, an Evangelical young man asked me to read an essay by a radio evangelist and give him my honest opinion about it. If I had followed my usual determination, I would not have read past the first page; but I am happy I read the whole thing; because I came across something while preparing this response that has been fascinating.

The author cited Joseph Smith’s prophecy that Orson Hyde would go to Jerusalem and claimed that Orson Hyde never went there. That statement was so astonishingly, brazenly, false, that I had to read for myself his cited source: Prophecies of Joseph Smith and their Fulfillment.

The citation gave the opposite of what he had claimed; but I found a prophecy therein that I had never before encountered. What makes this oracle so interesting is the fact that its provenance occurred entirely outside of Mormon involvement.

Joseph Smith spoke this prophecy privately to his non-Mormon attorney, who never mentioned it until he was startled to see it fulfilled long after Joseph Smith’s death. He explained it to his brother-in-law who then shared it with the editor of the LDS magazine The Improvement Era in 1902.

I was so impressed with the information—and subsequent validation from contemporary sources that I had to write up a summary of it to share with my friends. It follows below:

In 1902, LDS author and Editor Junius Wells met in Salt Lake City with Leonidas Lawson, the brother-in-law of Alexander Doniphan, who had passed away fifteen years earlier. Doniphan had been a US Military leader during the Mexican-American War as well as a prominent attorney in Missouri—having represented Joseph Smith in the 1830’s.

Lawson was engaged in compiling a biography of Doniphan and told Wells about a prophecy made by Joseph Smith and its astonishing fulfillment that had never been published—and likely had not been reported outside of Doniphan’s family.

Junius Wells asked Lawson to write the account and send it to him. Lawson did so very soon after their meeting. In turn, Wells wrote an article for the Improvement Era containing the full letter from which I quote below:

New York City, February 7, 1902 … In the year 1863, I visited General A. W. Doniphan at his home in Jackson County, Mo. This was soon after the devastation of Jackson County, Mo., under what is known as ‘Order No. 11.’ This devastation was complete. Farms were everywhere destroyed, and the farm houses were burned.

During this visit General Doniphan related the following historical facts and personal incidents: …[there follows a brief history of the troubles the Saints encountered in being driven from Jackson County in 1833, and ultimately from the entire state of Missouri in 1838—and of the fact that Alexander Doniphan served as defense attorney for Joseph Smith while in Liberty Jail.]

On one occasion General Doniphan caused the sheriff of the county to bring Joseph Smith from the prison to his law office, for the purpose of consultation about his defense. During Smith’s presence in the office, a resident of Jackson County, Missouri, came in for the purpose of paying a fee which was due by him to the firm of Doniphan and Baldwin, and offered in payment a tract of land in Jackson County.

Doniphan told him that his partner, Mr. Baldwin, was out at the moment, but as soon as he had an opportunity he would consult him and decide about the matter. When the Jackson man retired, Joseph Smith, who had overheard the conversation, addressed General Doniphan about as follows:

“Doniphan, I advise you not to take that Jackson County land in payment of the debt. God’s wrath hangs, over Jackson County. God’s people have been ruthlessly driven from it and you will live to see the day when it will be visited by fire and sword. The Lord of Hosts will sweep it with the besom of destruction. The fields and farms and houses will be destroyed, and only the chimneys will be left to mark the desolation.”

General Doniphan said to me that the devastation of Jackson County forcibly reminded him of this remarkable prediction of the Mormon prophet.

Yours sincerely,
L.M. Lawson

Junius Wells was also familiar with a judge living in Utah County who had served as a Union soldier in Kansas and Missouri, and wrote to him—without mentioning the prophecy—asking about the devastation inflicted on Jackson County during the Civil War.

Here is a portion of Judge A. Saxey’s reply to Wells, written in August of 1902:

“I went down the Blue River. We found houses, barns, outbuildings, nearly all burned down, and nothing left standing but the chimneys, which had, according to the fashion of the time, been built on the outside of the buildings.” It seems that the landscape of solitary chimneys left a lasting impression on those who witnessed the effects of Order #11.

I did a Google search for the words “chimney” and “Jackson County,” and these recollections can be found in several places: …Order #11 was the most heinous order ever issued during the Civil War. It depopulated Jackson, Cass, Bates, & part of Vernon Counties and reduced this area to ashes. It was the first time in America’s history that a United States president endorsed such a violent act against citizens within his own country.

…The road from Independence to Lexington was crowded with women and children, women walking with their babies in their arms, packs on their back, and four or five children following after them-some crying for bread, some crying to be taken back to their homes. Alas! They knew not that their once happy homes were gone. The torch had been applied- nothing left to tell the tale of carnage but the chimneys. … It is well-known that men were shot down in the very act of obeying the order, and their wagons and effects seized by their murderers.

Large trains of wagons, extending over the prairies for miles in length, and moving Kansasward, were freighted with every description of household furniture and wearing apparel belonging to the exiled inhabitants. Dense columns of smoke arising in every direction marked the conflagrations of dwellings, many of the evidences of which are yet to be seen in the remains of seared and blackened chimneys, standing as melancholy monuments of a ruthless military despotism which spared neither age, sex, character, nor condition. Some civilians were even summarily executed—a few as old as seventy years of age.

Ewing’s four counties became a devastated “no man’s land,” with only charred chimneys and burnt stubble showing where homes and thriving communities had once stood, earning the sobriquet “The Burnt District.”

Even the artwork depicting the landscape following the war includes the defining feature of Joseph Smith’s prophecy: a burned down home with only the chimney left standing.

(Thanks to Alma Allred for the contribution. Check him out on X) Check out this article to read about Joseph Smith’s last dream.