Returning to a place from which we were forced into exile

Last updated on: November 21, 2025 at 4:06 pm by Dan Peterson

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Returning to a place from which we were forced into exile 2025-11-21T16:06:06-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The reconstructed Nauvoo Illinois Temple, the original of which was destroyed by arson (and then, perhaps mercifully, by a tornado) not long after the forcible expulsion of the Latter-day Saints from the then United States of America in 1846. (LDS Media Library)

This is the third time that I’ve been back to Nauvoo in 2025, and the fourth time that I’ve come back during 2024 and 2025. We’re here for more work on our series of Becoming Brigham documentaries, which still appears to be on track for launch in the latter part of January 2026. Things seem to be on track for launching the series in mid- to late January, with weekly short features appearing each week thereafter. We won’t be attempting to monetize the series; we’ll make the episodes available as widely as possible and at no charge. I hope, though, that you’ll watch them when they appear, and that you’ll share them with others and help us to get the word out. I’m really pleased with what we’ve been getting, and I think that you’ll find value in the content we’ve captured.

It’s distinctly colder here than the last time I was in the area, which was only a few weeks ago. But it was very beautiful late this afternoon, with the declining sun from the west brilliantly illuminating the face of the magnificent westward-facing Nauvoo Illinois Temple and backlighting the trees , which still retain (though not for much longer) their autumn foliage of green, red, orange, and gold.

I wonder what the Nauvoo Saints of, say, 1846-1847 would have thought about such return trips as mine. Would they have been astounded that many of the old Nauvoo houses and other important buildings are back in the hands of Latter-day Saints, who were driven out of the city nearly two centuries ago? How would they feel about the reconstructed temple that crowns the bluff and overlooks the Mississippi River?

“I was in Nauvoo on the 26th of May, 1846, for the last time, and left the city of the Saints feeling that most likely I was taking a final farewell of Nauvoo for this life. I looked upon the temple and city as they receded from view and asked the Lord to remember the sacrifices of His Saints.” (Wilford Woodruff [1807-1898], after 1839 a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and, from 1889 until his death in September 1898, the fourth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)

I think of such things. And, despite the early hour at which I was obliged to stagger out of bed yesterday morning and the nearly three-hour flight to St. Louis and the increasingly familiar three-hour drive from St. Louis up the River, I always try to think about the ease of my journey. I don’t want to take that ease for granted. I want to appreciate the sacrifices made by my spiritual forebears (and, in one genealogical line at least, by my biological ancestors), and to carry on worthily after them.

Here is an excerpt from an account given by Col. Thomas Kane, not a Latter-day Saint, who visited Nauvoo in September 1846, after the Latter-day Saints had abandoned the city:

I had left my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a carriage, and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming flies, the only scavengers of the locality.

From this place to where the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere sordid, vagabond, and idle settlers, and a country marred, without being improved, by their careless hands. I was descending the last hill-side upon my journey, when a landscape in delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright new dwellings, set in cool green gardens, ranging up around a stately dome-shaped hill, which was crowned by a noble edifice, whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city appeared to cover several miles, and beyond it, in the background, there rolled off a fair country, chequered by the careful lines of fruitful husbandry. The un-mistakeable marks of industry, enterprise, and educated wealth everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most striking beauty. It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a skiff, and rowing across the river, landed at the chief wharf of the city. No one met me there. I looked, and saw no one. I could hear no one move, though the quiet everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the water-ripples break against the shallow of the beach. I walked through the solitary street. The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness, from which I almost feared to wake it, for plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing up in the paved ways; rains had not entirely washed away the prints of dusty footsteps.

Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty workshops, rope-walks and smithies. The spinner’s wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his work-bench and shavings, his unfinished sash and casing. Fresh bark was in the tanner’s vat, and the fresh-chopped lightwood stood piled against the baker’s oven. The blacksmith’s shop was cold; but his coal heap and lading pool, and crooked water horn were all there, as if he had just gone off for a holiday. No work-people anywhere looked to know my errand.

If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket-latch loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartsease, and lady-slippers, and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunted over the beds for cucumbers and love-apples—no one called out to me from any opened window, or dog sprang forward to bark an alarm.

I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered them, I found dead ashes white upon the hearths, and had to tread a tip-toe, as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes from the naked floors. On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard; but there was no record of plague there, nor did it in anywise differ much from other Protestant American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long sodded; some of the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and their black inscriptions glossy in the mason’s hardly dried lettering ink. Beyond the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw, in one spot hard by where the fruited boughs of a young orchard had been roughly torn down, the still smouldering remains of a barbecue fire, that had been constructed of rails from the fencing around it. It was the latest sign of life there. Fields upon fields of heavy-headed yellow grain lay rotting un-gathered upon the ground. No one was there to take in their rich harvest.

As far as the eye could reach they stretched away—they sleeping, too, in the hazy air of autumn. Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this mysterious solitude. On the southern suburb, the houses looking out upon the country showed, by their splintered wood-work and walls battered to the foundation, that they had lately been the mark of a destructive cannonade. And in and around the splendid Temple, which had been the chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked, surrounded by their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance. These challenged me to render an account of myself, and why I had had the temerity to cross the water without written permit from a leader of their band.

Though these men were generally more or less under the influence of ardent spirits, after I had explained myself as a passing stranger, they seemed anxious to gain my good opinion. They told the story of the Dead City; that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial mart, sheltering over twenty thousand persons; that they had waged war with its inhabitants for several years, and had been finally successful only a few days before my visit, in an action fought in front of the ruined suburb; after which they had driven them forth at the point of the sword. The defence, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the third day’s bombardment. They boasted greatly of their prowess, especially in this battle, as they called it; but I discovered they were not of one mind as to certain of the exploits that had distinguished it, one of which, as I remember, was, that they had slain a father and his son, a boy of fifteen, not long residents of the fated city, whom they admitted to have borne a character without reproach.

They also conducted me inside the massive sculptured walls of the curious Temple, in which they said the banished inhabitants were accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship. They particularly pointed out to me certain features of the building which, having been the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they had, as a matter of duty, sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed sites of certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed; and various sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well, constructed, they believed, with a dreadful design. Beside these, they led me to see a large and deep chiselled marble vase or basin, supported upon twelve oxen, also of marble, and of the size of life, of which they told some romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were emigrants from a great distance, believed their Deity countenanced their reception here of a baptism of regeneration, as proxies for whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come. That here parents ‘went into the water’ for their lost children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons for their lovers; that thus the Great Vase came to be for them associated with all dear and distant memories, and was therefore the object, of all others in the building, to which they attached the greatest degree of idolatrous affection. On this account, the victors had so diligently desecrated it, as to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to abide in.

They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple, to see where it had been lightning-struck the Sabbath before; and to look out, east and south, on wasted farms like those I had seen near the city, extending till they were lost in the distance. Here, in the face of the pure day, close to the scar of the divine wrath left by the thunderbolt, were fragments of food, cruises of liquor, and broken drinking vessels, with a bass drum and a steamboat signal bell, of which I afterwards learned the use with pain. (Quoted in George A. Smith, “Historical Address” [8 and 9 October 1868], Journal of Discourses 13:115-118. My thanks to FAIR for making this text easily accessible.]

Posted from Keokuk, Iowa

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But, umm, the notion of a restoration isn't uniquely LDS!