Expulsion of the Strangites

Summary

Within three weeks of the shooting of James Jesse Strang on 16 June 1856, the entire Mormon population of Beaver Island was removed from it. The departures began voluntarily: Strang himself left on the propeller Louisville on 28 June, and families followed on the Iowa two days later. They ended in early July with an armed party from the mainland ordering the remaining Saints to the harbour on pain of having their houses burned, crowding them aboard whatever steamers came in, and taking possession of their property. Quaife estimates about 2,600 people were driven out; that estimate rests on Strang’s own 1854 census and is contested. The land was afterwards occupied by the fishermen and their successors, and Beaver Island’s Irish Catholic settlement dates from this moment.

History

Sequence

The removal

Quaife’s account, drawn from the church historian Warren Post and from survivors he interviewed in 1918–1920:

Bands of swearing, drunken ruffians went about the island commanding the Mormons to assemble at the harbor for immediate departure, on peril of having their homes burned over their heads. There they were crowded on board steamers, as many as the vessels could carry, and started into exile; up the Lake or down the Lake, it was all the same to the mobbers, who, even before the Saints had left the harbor began the appropriation of their property.³

Named vessels: the Keystone State (which took a load to Chicago), the Iowa, and the Louisville (to Detroit, “all she could stow”).⁶⁷ A contemporary letter records 490 taken to Chicago on a single boat and 300 having gone earlier on the Iowa.⁶ Quaife’s illustrative case is Wingfield Watson, ordered to bring his goods to the harbour within a day although his wife had given birth three days before; the family walked the King’s Highway to the harbour and were put aboard the Keystone State without their cattle or possessions, and landed on a Chicago dock to sit in the July sun for most of a day.⁷

The 1892 Michigan Pioneer sketch is briefer and equally categorical: “a mob of angry fishermen and others descended upon the Mormon settlement, burned the temple, sacked the ‘royal palace,’ and drove the subjects of the fallen monarch from the islands in hot haste. The dispersion of the Beaver island Mormons was complete.”⁸

Quaife names St. Helena Island, near the Straits, as the assembly point for the attacking party, and the Newton brothers — traders there — as prominent in it, quoting a local ballad: “‘Arch Newton now must lead us on, / We’ll sweep the Beavers clean.’”⁹

The other version

Elizabeth Whitney Williams heard the story from her brother Lewis, who was “one of the men chosen the year before to help preserve law and order in the sending away of the Mormons” and who went to the island “to help get the people away on the steamboats that were sent to carry them from the island.” In her telling many Mormons left at once and voluntarily, having means of their own; the scenes at the dock were of grief rather than violence — “Women fainted and were carried on board; children were crying. Even men were sobbing, and two or three attempted to throw themselves from the dock into the water to end their misery” — and, critically, “All were allowed to take their household goods, yet many did not do so.”¹⁰ The Cleveland Plaindealer, reported in Louisiana on 22 July, likewise described the Mormons as “leaving Beaver Island … en masse, and selling their property for the most they can get.”¹¹

Against her, a New Hampshire paper of 19 July reported: “About ninety Mormons, driven out from Beaver Island, arrived at Chicago last Wednesday, in a state of destitution. Others were landed at Milwaukie and Racine. They were compelled to leave their property behind them.”¹² The number in that paragraph is much smaller than the 490 in Quaife’s source, and may refer to a single arrival; the statement about property is flatly contrary to Williams.

A contemporary account that belongs to neither camp reached print in October. A signed travel letter in the Central Presbyterian of Richmond, Virginia, of 25 October 1856 describes a stop at the islands shortly after Strang’s death, its information taken chiefly from the sheriff of Mackinac county, a fellow passenger. The writer found a flag flying at the wharf inscribed “No King Strang”; reports that the elders had fled ahead of the sheriff, the general impression being that they would make their way to Utah; and says the sheriff’s men found the undressed hides of cattle stolen from them months before, still carrying their owners’ marks. Where Quaife and the 1892 sketch describe a population swept off the island entirely, this letter reports “the other Mormons, most of whom would seem to have been duped by their leaders … we found living quietly at the Islands — no longer Mormons, however, in their faith.”¹³ That is a contemporary report of people remaining, and it does not sit easily with a complete removal. The letter’s own dating is loose, though — it places the coronation three years rather than six before 1856 — and its sympathies are plainly with the party that broke the colony up.

The character of the removal is contested. Whether it is best described as an expulsion at gunpoint, a panicked voluntary exodus, or both in sequence depends on which witness is preferred; the sources held here support a sequence beginning with voluntary flight and ending in coercion.

The manifesto

The party that took the island printed its own statement on the captured press of the Northern Islander, 1850–1856, as an “Extra” retitled Islander Redeemed. The Buffalo Express received a copy and remarked that the slip was “shockingly printed” because “the only means they possess for printing are so rude as scarcely to afford a tangible result,” adding that “the time has come for the redemption of that unfortunate portion of Michigan, and we shall soon receive from there a respectable newspaper, in lieu of the despicable Islander.”⁵

The dominion of King Strang is at an end. The band of marauders, once occupying the Beaver group of islands, under the administration and direction of James J. Strang, their reputed Prophet, have fled at the approach of the Sheriff. The land is redeemed; a kingdom no longer exists upon the borders of one of our most populous States. … It should be matter, therefore, of public rejoicing to all persons living contiguous to the Lakes that this nest of banditti have been exterminated, and we would take this occasion to caution the citizens of Wisconsin against many of them who have fled within her precincts.⁵

The same document accuses Strang of census fraud: “The census returns made for the county of Emmet, under his own hands, show an aggregate population of 7,000, whilst in reality it falls below 1,000.” That allegation is the principal counterweight to the Mormon population figures; see Kingdom of Saint James.⁵

Numbers

Quaife’s estimate of about 2,600 expelled is an extrapolation from the Northern Islander’s report of a census of autumn 1854 showing 2,608 residents on Big Beaver Island. The direct evidence of vessel loads in his sources totals about 790 (490 to Chicago plus 300 on the Iowa) plus the Louisville’s unspecified load.³⁶ Everything above that figure is extrapolation from a count Strang’s own people made and Strang’s own paper printed.

Aftermath

Quaife records that the exiles scattered — many to the Reorganized Church, some to Utah, most out of Mormonism altogether — and that the church, left without a designated successor, disintegrated. The Michigan historian Byron M. Cutcheon, quoted by Quaife, called the day of the expulsion “the most disgraceful day in Michigan history.”³ The men who took the island stayed: the 1892 sketch notes that they and their successors “are still in possession of the fruits of conquest,” living in the abandoned Mormon cabins, with the office of the Northern Islander converted into “the best hotel” in St. James and Catholicism become the island’s dominant religion.⁸

Elizabeth Whitney Williams’s 1905 memoir carries a photograph of the printing office in a later use as a boardinghouse, captioned “the old Mormon Printing Office, now the Gibson House.”

Williams’s memoir, writing of her family’s own return to the island afterward, gives the fullest account held here of the unfinished Mormon temple’s end, and it does not match the 1892 sketch’s claim that the mob burned it during the mobbing itself: “At the time the Mormons left the island the temple was left standing. The excitement was so great and the Gentiles feared the Mormons might return with another leader in Strang’s place, so they thought best to burn the temple. It was of the exact pattern as the one at Kirtland, Ohio, as Strang had built it after the same plans. The building was all up and inclosed, but not yet finished.”¹⁴ On her account the burning was a later, deliberate act by the settlers who took over the island, driven by fear of a Strangite return, not part of the expulsion violence itself.

Significance

In a few days the expulsion ended the Strang era and transferred an entire built landscape — cleared farms, hewn-log houses, roads, a sawmill and a printing office — from one population to another. The Irish fishing settlement that has defined the island ever since begins here. It is also the reason the island’s Mormon documentary record is so thin: the press stopped, the files scattered, and the victors wrote the history.

Sources

Added 28 July 2026 · revised 2 August 2026. Recent changes