days afterwards the mob began to collect again until several hundreds rendezvoused at a few miles distant from . They immediately commenced making aggressions upon the citizens called Mormons, taking away their hogs & Cattle and threatening them with extermination of utter extinction; saying that they had a cannon and there should be no compromise only at its mouth: frequently taking taking men, women & children prisoners, whipping them and lacerating their bodies with hickory withes and tying them to trees and depriving them of food until they were compelled to gnaw the bark from the trees to which they were bound in order to sustain life; treating them in the most cruel manner they could invent or think of and doing every they could to excite us indignation of the Mormon people to rescue them in order that they might make that a pretext of an accusation for the breach of the law, and that they might the better excite the prejudice of the populace & thereby get aid & assistance to carry out their hellish purposes of extermination. Immediately on the authentication of these facts, messengers were dispatched from to , Judge of the fifth judicial district of the State of , and also to , Commander in chief of that division, and giving them information of the existing facts and demanding immediate assistance. returned with the messengers and went immediately to and from then to , and he found the facts were true as reported to him;— that the citizens of that were assembled together in a hostile attitude to the amount of two or three hundred men, threatening the utter extermination of the Mormons, he immediately returned to and ordered out a sufficient military force to quell the mob. Immediately after they were dispersed & the army returned; the mob commenced collecting again soon after; we again applied for military aid when came out with a force of sixty armed men to ; but they were in such a State of insubordination that he said he could not control them and it thought adviseable by , & others that they should return home; ordered to call out the military of and defend the against the mob, for said he, you have great reason to be alarmed from the Platte country had come down with 200 armed men and had taken up their Station at Hunter’s mill, a place distant about 17 or 18 miles north west of the of the town of , and also that an armed force had collected at , in Carroll county, about 50 miles south east of , where about 70 families of the Mormon people had settled upon the bank of [p. 62]