King of the North

ED: In 1844, the founder of the Mormon religion, Joseph Smith, was killed in Nauvoo, Illinois. Schisms quickly formed among his followers. Brigham Young and Sydney Rigdon, apostles to Smith, represented one rivalry.Young led his followers to Utah, now home to millions of devotees.Rigdon led his followers to found a branch of the church in Pennsylvania.

BRIAN: But there was a third would-be leader who emerged, and his name was James Strang. He was a publisher and the lawyer who claimed that, like Smith, he was a prophet receiving messages directly from God.Many Mormons who had flocked to Smith because of his powers of divination now turned to Strang.

Mormons at this time were being expelled from their communities in both Illinois and Missouri. So Strang took a few hundred of his followers and struck out. But he didn’t go east. He didn’t go west. In fact, he went north. Their destination– a patch of land in Lake Michigan called Beaver Island.

BackStory producer Andrew Parsons has that story. ANDREW PARSONS: NO one really knows why James Strang shose Beaver Island in particular. But one thing was sure.

SANDRA BIRDSALL: Beaver Island had a lot of lumber, and the fishing was really, really, good.

BRIAN: This is Sandra Birdsall.

SANDRA BIRDSALL: And I live on Beaver Island.

BRIAN: Birdsall is an officer at the Beaver Island Historical Society and is putting together an exhibit on James Strang. We reached her on vacation in South Carolina on– you guessed it– an island.

She says the government had surveyed the nearly 56 square-mile Beaver Island in the late 1840s and put cheap land for sale. It’s lush, remote, and beautiful– advantageous to industrious pioneers. In 1848, James Strang and a few hundred of his followers bought some land and quickly set up a colony on the scenic shores. SANDRA BIRDSALL: The Mormons had been thrown out of everywhere else in the US that they were, and they came to Beaver Island thinking it would be secluded and safe. And the island was financially very successful. It was a very industrious group of people that came.

BRIAN: John Hamer, editor of a book about schisms in the Church of Latter-day Saints and a Mormon himself, says that secluded and safe was important after years of persecution.

JOHN HAMER: If you were going to go and establish a new Mormonkingdom, islands kind of have the sense that they are autonomous.

BRIAN: But Beaver Island wasn’t entirely autonomous. There were other people– a small trading outpost was there as well as a large fishing community on nearby Mackinac Island. And it’s not like Strang didn’t recognize that. He thought that apart from farming and fishing, Mormons could trade, which would help build a prosperous community. The new neighbors, however, weren’t having any of it. They had been eyeing the good fishing on Beaver Island after overfishing the shores of Mackinac.JOHN HAMER: There were conflicts right away. So the non-Mormons did not like the influx of Mormons. BRIAN: The Strangites were often assaulted by Mackinac islanders, and at times fought back.

SANDRA BIRDSALL: There was one early conflict with a Mormon and a shopkeeper that ended up with a man being shot. And I think that was the very first, and sort of endemic then to what the attitude was between the two groups.

BRIAN: Newspapers picked up on this conflict, and started publishing exaggerated stories about Mormon mischief– theft, piracy, and violence.Soon a newspaper war was started– Strangites shot back in the pages of their own daily, The Northern Islander. In one case, they called a reporterfrom the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Mr. Plain Liar, Junior.

MALE SPEAKER: We will assure him a good horse-whippingadministered according to Mormon law in the presence of a multitude of witnesses. SANDRA BIRDSALL: Now, early on, Strang wasn’t even on Beaver Island as the tensions mounted. In 1849, he took a long trip east to recruit people to the settlement. But when he came back the following year, things escalated a bit more. Now, this man who claimed to be prophet was crowning himself king.

JOHN HAMER: People reported it fairly quickly, and so that was well-known. And that was a subject of both disdain and also ridicule fairly early on. Although technically he’s not king of the island, he’s king of the Kingdom of God on Earth. But, you know, it was easy for the outsiders to say, you know, he’s king of Beaver Island. [LAUGH]

BRIAN: Strang began issuing edicts to the rest of the island. Most were about living piously– no gambling, alcohol, coffee, or tea. But eventually he ordered everyone on the island to convert to his church or else be jailed.

And that’s when Washington got involved. The situation landed on the desk of President Millard Fillmore. He ordered a federal prosecutor to do something about Strang.

JOHN HAMER: It’s able to go up the flag pole pretty fast, and so they decide that one of the ways that they maybe will be able to stop the settlement up there is by simply arresting Strang himself, and then trying him for all kinds of different things, like tampering with the mail and illegal trespass on federal lands. BRIAN: The government’s case quickly got bogged down in details of frontier law and unreliable witnesses. But Strang was prepared. He had a much clearer defense– religious freedom.

JOHN HAMER: Strang was actually very eloquent in the trial– kind of showed all of his prosecutors to be persecutors. And so essentially, ultimately they had to acquit him and release him, which made it really hard to prosecute him after that.

BRIAN: Not only did Strang survive the charges, the trial propelled him to greater influence in the region. Many newspapers now gave him favorable press, and he even got elected state senator, representing 26 Michigan counties– twice. SANDRA BIRDSALL: And there were people talking about him in the press as possibly running for governor. BRIAN: For a few years, it looked look like Strang had pulled it off. His settlement was economically prosperous, and statewide, he was respected. But back on Beaver Island, he earned his share of enemies. His edicts created dissenters among his followers, including requiring women to wear bloomers and punishments that included flogging. JOHN HAMER: And so essentially a group of dissenters– ultimately they had no capacity to arrest him and have any of the charges stick. And so they formed a conspiracy to assassinate him.

BRIAN: On June 16, 1856, a warship named the USS Michigan pulled up to Beaver Island, and the captain asked to meet with Strang.

SANDRA BIRDSALL: And Strang shows up on the dock and the two assassins are waiting for him.

BRIAN: He was shot in the back by two disgruntled followers. In events that Birdsall says implicate the federal government, the shooters boarded the USS Michigan and were carted off to the mainland, where they faceda small fine by a local judge.

Strang was rushed to the Mormon city of Voree, Wisconsin, and died there a few weeks later. An unruly mob destroyed the settlement and forced all of the Mormons left on Beaver Island onto boats.

JOHN HAMER: They were then dropped off all around the edges of Lake Michigan– in Wisconsin and Michigan and Illinois and Indiana– in small groups so that they wouldn’t be able to regather easily. And so they’re total refugees, they’re destitute, and they aren’t connected to each other,and just separated and leaderless.

BRIAN: Now, this episode on Beaver Island might sound like a quirky hidden piece of American history. Honestly, it was for BackStory staff when we first found it. But–

DAVID AUGUST: For us, it was a tragedy.

BRIAN: This is David August.

DAVID AUGUST: I’m a member of the remnant Strangite Church.

BRIAN: August says there are only about 100 fully practicing Strangites in the United States today. Most people, even other Mormons, assume the sect was extinguished when they were forced off Beaver Island. But August says that most people miss a lot of context when telling the story of James Strang. First, this was the American frontier, where many religions and utopian communities were started.

Second, the church is largely built around his teachings about social justice. And he says, even Strang’s corination has precedent. Both Joseph Smith and leader Brigham Young did the same. DAVID AUGUST: In all those cases, it’s not a king like it displaces the government of the United States and establishes a kingdom that way. It’s a spiritual affiliation to someone who is a prophet, is also king. It’s not an uncommon thing. If you look at the Old Testament, David was a king.Solomon was a king. Christ was a king.

But it’s much easier and more fun to just say, eh, he was a crazy guy. He thought he was king, you know?

BRIAN: John Hamer says many in the press, even scholars, don’t feel an obligation to take Strang seriously. And that, he sees, as something of a double standard.

JOHN HAMER: There’s a lot of ways with which, let’s say, the Joseph Smith’s story itself, the idea that there was an ancient record buried on gold plates, and angels , and all that kind of thing, and people believing that very literally. But historians of religion and religious studies don’t go in and talk to people in Utah as if all of this stuff is ridiculous. They talk to them respectfully. They take their beliefs seriously. And that just hasn’t been the case largely for historians dealing with the Strangites– possibly because there’s so few of them or people maybe think that they’re extinct.

BRIAN: Maybe the story of James Strang is a little strange. But in the vast seas of American history, it’s certainly not an island unto itself.

ED: Andrew Parsons is a producer on our show.