Ep 194 – King Follet pt. 2 The Myth

Naked Mormonism Podcast

Bryce Blankenagel

Ldschurch, Christianity, Latterdaysaints, Religion, Ldschurchhistory, Mormons, Religion & Spirituality, Mormonhistory, Bookofmormon, Mormonism, Josephsmith, Mormon

4.7 • 680 Ratings

🗓️ 14 February 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this episode, we take on the remainder of King Follett from his internment in the Columbia, Missouri jail to his death in Nauvoo. He’s acquitted of his robbery charges, arriving in Quincy, Illinois in October 1839 in a completely overcrowded and destitute state. He works with the Mormon refugees to help build Commerce into Nauvoo, build public works projects, construct houses, staff on city committees, and a litany of other services. The Follett family become regular attendees of many active church leadership groups. Louisa Follett joins the Relief Society on its second meeting. Two of King and Louisa’s sons join important missions and the ranks of a Quorum of Seventies. King Follett donates his tithing of time to the Temple Building Committee in addition to being paid by the Temple Committee in vouchers for additional work on the Nauvoo Temple. He, like many others, exchanged his temple vouchers for goods at the Temple Store. Finally, we discuss King Follett’s untimely death at age 55 in March of 1844. He was a beloved member of the community with a funeral procession extending a mile and buried with Masonic honors. We briefly follow the lives of his surviving family after his death and read a bit from Louisa Follett’s small but consequential journal.

Links:

The Man Behind the Discourse: The Biography of King Follett by Joann Follett Mortensen
https://gregkofford.com/products/the-man-behind-the-discourse

Show links:

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Music by Jason Comeau http://aloststateofmind.com/
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Legal Counsel http://patorrez.com/

Transcript

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0:00.0	I am Ryan McKnight. I'm Kara Santa Maria. I am Christopher Smith. Hi, I'm Andrew Torres. This is
0:08.1	Naked Mormonism. The Serial Mormon History podcast. King Fulet is languishing in a Missouri prison.
0:20.8	He, Morris Phelps, and a parley Pratt attempted a
0:24.2	dangerous escape from the jail, but King Follett was apprehended before he could get away.
0:31.2	The nights are cold. The visitors are infrequent. The food is terrible and the floors are hard. The worst part,
0:40.4	though, King Follett's family made the trek from far west Missouri to Quincy, Illinois, without
0:46.4	him to help, and he doesn't know when he's going to be released from prison. King Follett was,
0:53.3	however, optimistic about his future. While Parley Pratt
0:56.6	and Morris Phelps and most other church leaders were arraigned in on heavy charges of treason and
1:02.0	murder for the Battle of Cricket River, testimony from Reed Peck during the November 1838 Court
1:07.9	of Inquiry, which landed them all in prison in the first place,
1:17.4	had exonerated King Follett from those heavier charges. That same testimony, though, placed King as the leader of the regulator squad of Danites who had ran their horses through the non-Mormon
1:23.1	settlements and pillaged the towns before burning them to the ground. So he was officially charged
1:29.2	with robbery, while nearly every other church leader who had been charged with anything from
1:33.3	the Missouri Mormon War had escaped prison or been acquitted. King Follett was one of the last
1:39.4	remaining Mormons in Missouri, only because he was behind bars. From Joan Follett Mortensen's biography of King
1:47.4	Follett describing the charges, quote. The charge of robbery is also somewhat ambiguous.
1:54.5	Sympathetically, Pratt recounted that King was dragged from his distressed family just as they
1:59.2	were leaving the state, being charged with
2:01.3	robbery, which meant that he was one of a posse who took a keg of powder from a gang of ruffians
2:07.2	who were out against the Mormons. I have found no further details about where or when this
2:12.2	powder cake incident occurred, although an owner is identified in King's trial. Reed Peck's account of the Missouri
	...

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