This is the Naked Mormon History Travel Log for March 27th, 2017.

Today was primarily a driving day, as I was making my way from Navu down to Missouri.

However, there was one amazing stop in between, and that was Carthage

jail. Wow. Carthage jail was fantastic. So one thing that hit me so much with Navu is like, this is

the finality of it. This is, you know, Joseph's magnum opus. That's what I said and

described it as in the last travel log. But this, Carthage, that was the final end point. That was

where it truly all came crashing down, where so much, any plans that Joseph Smith had, any ideas of what he wanted to do

or where he wanted to take the church, all came to a screeching halt.

And so many people couch it as Joseph knew that he was going out to die, that this would be the time that he was, he wasn't going to be able to escape this jail.

And, you know, Joseph said when pretty much any time that he was becoming incarcerated that he was going to die, you know, when he was being arrested and taken to the Richmond Court of Inquiry in November of 1838, he, not only he, but Emma and Lucy Mack Smith, they were both well convinced that he was going to die and be killed by the mobs.

But they were state-sanctioned militia, so he had certain protections. But, you know,

he had cried wolf many, many times. It just so happened that this time there happened to be a

wolf. And Joseph and Hiram both were shot and killed. John Taylor was shot, I believe it was four

times. Or he had four bullets in him.

He may have been shot more times that bullets had passed through.

But he was shot four times.

And then Willard Richards, the cousin to Brigham Young, the magnificent meat shield that

he was, didn't, you know, suffer any damage except for a bullet apparently grazed his earlobe.

Now, in going through the tour of Carthage, it was fascinating because there's nothing really

Mormon history related around it, because nothing happened in Carthage except for the Carthage

jail shootout, the gunfight. And so I'll tell you kind of what the tour encapsulated.

The tour started in the visitor center where they had, you know, a couple of missionaries that showed us this, I guess you can call it an impactful movie that was essentially an editorialized version of Jeffrey R. Hollins 2009 conference speech, October 2009 conference speech.

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