Martha: I see. Well, I heard you'd married and had some kids.
Porter: Yea, back in Independence, Missouri when I was young I married a sweet little gal named Luana Beebe. In fact, it was the first Mormon wedding in Jackson County. At the time, my dad and I ran a ferry across the Big Blue. We were so happy and had five little children.
Times were still trying, though. The mobs were being really harsh on the Saints, and just wouldn't leave'em alone! One day I came home to find a small band of mobs had destroyed my whole cabin, and there sat my Luana atop a rubble pile, just in desperate tears after having been raped.
To see her in such awful turmoil and pain, well, that hurt me to the bone! That's when I started practicing shooting with my pistol and rifle all the time. At that time we moved with the Saints up to Far West, where we lived with them in peace for a short time. But then the mobsters came up there, and started being really harsh again. There was a big battle at Crooked River, where a couple mobsters were killed along with a couple Saints. That's when Governor Boggs issued the Extermination Order.
And then there was the massacre at Hauns Mill, when the mob killed our men and boys alike. The mobsters finally got Joseph, and drug him off to Liberty Jail. Meanwhile, the Saints, many of them barefooted in the snow, trekked up to Illinois.
During the time Joseph was in jail, I took him letters from home, and smuggled in a pick to try and escape with. He and the others finally escaped eight months later. Joseph named the city that we had settled in Nauvoo, Illinois.
Well - all the persecution just got too hard on Luana, especially with what she'd been through, and she moved back in with her parents not long after. A couple years after the Saints migrated to Nauvoo, she divorced me, just couldn't take it all, and I don't blame her none. Luana and the children needed a more peaceful, decent life.
(for more information on Luana Beebe Rockwell see: http://www.emilyamandarockwell.com/index_files/page39.htm and http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tolleygenealogy/provocemmap.html)
Porter: Yea, back in Independence, Missouri when I was young I married a sweet little gal named Luana Beebe. In fact, it was the first Mormon wedding in Jackson County. At the time, my dad and I ran a ferry across the Big Blue. We were so happy and had five little children.
Times were still trying, though. The mobs were being really harsh on the Saints, and just wouldn't leave'em alone! One day I came home to find a small band of mobs had destroyed my whole cabin, and there sat my Luana atop a rubble pile, just in desperate tears after having been raped.
To see her in such awful turmoil and pain, well, that hurt me to the bone! That's when I started practicing shooting with my pistol and rifle all the time. At that time we moved with the Saints up to Far West, where we lived with them in peace for a short time. But then the mobsters came up there, and started being really harsh again. There was a big battle at Crooked River, where a couple mobsters were killed along with a couple Saints. That's when Governor Boggs issued the Extermination Order.
And then there was the massacre at Hauns Mill, when the mob killed our men and boys alike. The mobsters finally got Joseph, and drug him off to Liberty Jail. Meanwhile, the Saints, many of them barefooted in the snow, trekked up to Illinois.
During the time Joseph was in jail, I took him letters from home, and smuggled in a pick to try and escape with. He and the others finally escaped eight months later. Joseph named the city that we had settled in Nauvoo, Illinois.
Well - all the persecution just got too hard on Luana, especially with what she'd been through, and she moved back in with her parents not long after. A couple years after the Saints migrated to Nauvoo, she divorced me, just couldn't take it all, and I don't blame her none. Luana and the children needed a more peaceful, decent life.
(for more information on Luana Beebe Rockwell see: http://www.emilyamandarockwell.com/index_files/page39.htm and http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tolleygenealogy/provocemmap.html)
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