Two Minutes at Carthage

Part I

Zooming in

Before any of it is argued over, here is what happened and when. The martyrdom is usually told at one scale; it is more instructive at four. Start at sixteen months and descend — each gold window opens into the full width of the level below it, down to the two minutes on which the whole account rests.

Watch the meter at the bottom right as you go. At the top the record is public and abundant: newspapers, city minutes, a state indictment, a trial transcript. At the bottom it is two wounded men in a smoke-filled room, and one of them wrote the history afterwards. That is the shape of the problem — and the next section sets out, at its strongest, the account those two men left.

Part II

The account as the church tells it

Any honest critique has to begin with the strongest version of what it is criticising. So this section sets out the received account at its best — canonised text, contemporaneous journal, eyewitness narrative, and the church's own current telling — before a word is said against it.

The canonised announcement

The martyrdom entered scripture within weeks. Section 135 was added to the 1844 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants — set in smaller type on the final pages of a volume already nearly ready for the press when Joseph and Hyrum were killed.

They were shot in Carthage jail, on the 27th of June, 1844, about five o'clock p.m., by an armed mob—painted black—of from 150 to 200 persons. Hyrum was shot first and fell calmly, exclaiming: I am a dead man! Joseph leaped from the window, and was shot dead in the attempt, exclaiming: O Lord my God! They were both shot after they were dead, in a brutal manner, and both received four balls.

John Taylor and Willard Richards, two of the Twelve, were the only persons in the room at the time; the former was wounded in a savage manner with four balls, but has since recovered; the latter, through the providence of God, escaped, without even a hole in his robe.

Doctrine and Covenants 135:1–2 · on its disputed authorship see the Church Historian’s Press commentary

The narrative in six beats

Assembled from Willard Richards's journal and his published narrative, John Taylor's later account, and the church's current history, the received sequence runs:

1. Late afternoon. Four men are in the upstairs room of the jail — Joseph and Hyrum Smith, John Taylor, and Willard Richards. It is unguarded in any meaningful sense; the Carthage Greys are outside.
2. The mob arrives. A large body of men, faces blackened, rushes the jail. Richards, glancing past the curtain, sees them at the door below.
3. The door. The men inside push against the door as the mob forces the landing. A ball is fired through the door panel and strikes Hyrum in the face. He falls, saying I am a dead man.
4. The defence. Joseph fires a pepperbox pistol, smuggled in by Cyrus Wheelock, out through the doorway — three of six barrels misfire — and wounds several of the attackers. Taylor beats at the muskets coming through the doorway with a walking stick.
5. Taylor falls. Taylor is hit four times and rolls under the bed. Joseph springs for the east window and is shot in the attempt, falling to the ground outside with the words O Lord my God.
6. The aftermath. The mob scatters. Richards, alone and untouched, carries Taylor into the inner cell and covers him, then writes to Nauvoo the same evening.

In the survivor's own words

Richards published his narrative under the title Two Minutes in Jail within a month of the event. It is worth quoting exactly, because what it actually says is repeatedly misreported — in both directions.

Mr Taylor with a walking stick stood by his side and knocked down the bayonets and muskets which were constantly discharging through the door way, while I stood by him… ready to lend any assistance, with another stick, but could not come within striking distance, without going directly before the muzzle of the guns.

Willard Richards, “Two Minutes in Jail,” Nauvoo Neighbor, 24 July 1844; reprinted Times and Seasons 5:597–99, 1 Aug. 1844, and carried into the manuscript history at JSP History F-1, p. 184

And as the church tells it now

A few minutes later, the prisoners heard a rustling at the door and the crack of three or four gunshots. Willard glanced out the open window and saw a hundred men below, their faces blackened with mud and gunpowder, storming the entry to the jail.

Saints: The Standard of Truth (2018), ch. 44, “A Lamb to the Slaughter”

Why this account deserves to be taken seriously

It is easy to treat the traditional narrative as merely institutional. It is not. Six things stand in its favour, and a critique that skips them is not worth reading:

• It rests on two survivors who were in the room. Not on hearsay, not on later reconstruction. Richards wrote part of it down the same night.
• The mob is not in dispute by anyone. It is attested far outside Richards and Taylor — by Governor Thomas Ford, by the guards, by the coroner, by the Carthage Greys' conduct, and by Thomas Sharp's own Warsaw Signal, which had openly agitated for the killing beforehand.
• The state charged it as a conspiracy. Five men — Levi Williams, Thomas C. Sharp, Mark Aldrich, Jacob C. Davis and William N. Grover — stood trial for murder in May 1845. They were acquitted on 30 May by a jury seated after the original panel was dismissed, but the indictment itself is a public record of who the state believed did it.
• Participants confirmed it against their own interest. William Grover boasted of it. James Bilton confessed on his deathbed. Nobody on the mob's side has ever said the shooting inside was not theirs.
• The most rigorous forensic study of the physical evidence was done by faithful Latter-day Saint scholars, and it broadly supports the traditional reconstruction. Joseph L. Lyon and David W. Lyon published it in a church-sponsored, peer-reviewed journal, and the full text is free to read. They reconstructed the door-panel trajectory with a laser, concluded the ball was a .69 militia musket ball, and worked out a position for Hyrum — shoulder braced against the door, head bent forward — in which that shot could strike him medial to the left eye and exit below the jaw.
• It has been revised as evidence emerged. Saints (2018) quietly moved to a one-shot account of Hyrum's head wound and follows Richards's journal figure of a hundred men rather than the canonised 150–200. That is a church history correcting itself.

Part III

What testing did to it

Since 2008 the received account has been tested three ways: against the surviving artefacts, against replicated ballistics, and against the archive. It has not survived intact. What follows is every load-bearing element of the narrative, set beside what the testing produced — including the elements that came through.

Part IV

The door

Almost every disputed question at Carthage runs through one object: a half-inch black walnut door with two holes in it. The door is genuine, which is why it can carry the weight.

The authenticity question is settled

Three lines converge. The door matches all seven other interior doors in the building in material and handmade construction. A B. H. Roberts photograph from the early 1900s, taken when the jail was a private residence, shows the same size, shape and panel pattern, both holes present, the panel hole puttied, and the section above the latch already cut away by a relic hunter. And in the 1930s the missionaries Joseph and Eunice McRae located the person holding that cut-out chunk, recovered it, and replaced it in the door — where it fitted exactly, with matching grain. A section removed in 1844 fitting back ninety years later means the surrounding board is the same board.

A widely repeated claim that the Carthage door was sold in the March 2024 Community of Christ transaction is simply a factual error: that sale list specifies the original door of Liberty Jail, which is a visibly different door.

The dowel angle

Lyon & Lyon reconstructed the panel-hole trajectory with a laser pointer. A laser yields a line. John Tucker, an aerospace machinist, did something better: he cut a dowel to 58 inches — musket length less bayonet — taped the tip to match the hole diameter so that the hole itself controlled the angle, and photographed where the far end ended up. A dowel of actual barrel length yields not a line but a position for the shooter's body.

With the door closed, that position puts the musket out over the stair railing. To fire it, a man would have to stand on the railing and lean back over the stairwell, or hold the weapon above his head. Neither Lyon nor the later church-side reconstructions appear to have run this test; both placed the shooter inside the railing.

Where this leaves the door

The most consequential recent development belongs to Justin Griffin, and it cuts against his own thesis. Having concluded from the dowel angle that the panel shot could not have been made through a closed door, he now holds that a mob member pushed the door open with the musket barrel and fired through the panel — and says plainly, “I think the mob made that shot.”

That is a substantial concession, and he makes it against interest, which is to his credit. But it dissolves the syllogism his identification argument depends on:

Hyrum never left the room. No one from the mob ever went inside of the room. That means whoever shot Hyrum was in the room with him.

The argument as stated in the Who Killed Joseph Smith? podcast

With the door pushed open by a musket barrel, armed men on the landing, and Joseph firing back through the doorway and wounding three of them, the barrier between mob at the threshold and a shooter reaching into the room has collapsed — and it was Griffin who removed it. An open door plus an arm at intermediate range is, almost exactly, Steiner's reconstruction.

Part V

The witnesses, graded

Eleven surviving accounts describe what happened at that door. They are not equal, and the single most useful discipline in this whole subject is refusing to treat them as though they were. The tiers below grade by proximity; the assessments are this project's own.

The William Webb problem

Webb is the sharpest test the inside-job thesis faces, and it comes from its own grading system. He is Tier 1: a mob member on the landing, writing four months after, in his own name, in a letter attacking Thomas Sharp — so with no motive whatever to flatter the Mormon account. And he says a shot through the door dropped a man who never rose.

The handling of this in the critical literature is to say “I know that was impossible, so that's how I continue to attempt to analyse that account,” and to suggest Webb absorbed the detail from stories circulating afterwards. That inverts the order of operations — it is the same move the church is criticised for. Forensic evidence does generally outweigh eyewitness testimony, and that principle licenses setting a witness aside. It does not license rewriting what he meant.

There is a better answer sitting in Webb's own text. His sequence is: shot through the door → “the door flew open, I saw two men in the room.” Webb saw the room after the shot. A man already down when the door opened, credited to the shot just heard, is the most ordinary causal misattribution a witness can make. Nothing has to be imported and nobody has to be dishonest — Webb simply drew an obvious wrong inference from a true observation. That reading costs the critics nothing and is far more defensible.

Part VI

Willard Richards, and the number that grew

Richards is the most consequential witness in Latter-day Saint history for two reasons at once. He was one of two survivors in the room — and he became Church Historian and Recorder, the man through whose hands the documentary record passed. How far his own account can be trusted therefore bears on far more than Carthage.

The most checkable thing about him is a number. Within roughly six weeks of the martyrdom, the size of the mob is given at least six times, and the figures do not sit still.

What this establishes — and what it does not

Crowd estimation is notoriously unreliable, and a spread of 100 to 250 for a chaotic evening event is inside ordinary human error. Two things are nevertheless worth holding:

• The expansion happened the same night. The journal records what Richards saw — a hundred men. The note despatched to Nauvoo hours later reports what he believed — from 100 to 200. That is not memory drift over years; it is a widening inside a single evening, in a document written to convey danger.
• The canonised figure is the top of his own range. Section 135 gives 150 to 200 — narrower than the note, and higher. The lower half of what Richards actually saw did not make it into scripture.

Part VII

What is established, and what is not

The falsification case against the received account is now substantial. The replacement case — the identification of a different killer — is not. Keeping those two columns apart is the whole discipline of this page, because nearly every published treatment collapses them.

Why the identification fails

The charge is that two men in a room shot two others. Assessed on the ordinary elements:

• Opportunity — established, and nearly worthless. Taylor and Richards were the only other people in the room. So is every person present at any death. It is a precondition for the charge, not evidence for it.
• Means — not established, and this is where the case fails hardest. There is no evidence either man was armed. The documented weapons in that room are two, each traceable to the man who supplied it: Joseph's pepperbox from Cyrus Wheelock and Hyrum's single-shot pistol from John Fullmer. The three sources offered to arm the survivors do not do it — Thomas Sharp's Warsaw Signal (the chief accused conspirator, writing to justify the killing), Governor Ford's regret at not having the prisoners searched, and John Hay's line that Joseph had two revolvers.
• Motive — weak, borrowed, and pointing at the wrong men. No motive is developed from any Carthage evidence; it is imported from a succession thesis. And on that thesis the two men in the room are not the beneficiaries. Brigham Young was. Richards died in 1854 never having led the church; Taylor became president in 1877, thirty-three years later, by seniority.
• Act — the forensics are exclusionary, not identifying. Small calibre does not mean inside the room; the nine-wounds arithmetic advanced by the critics itself requires pistols at the door, and once pistols are at the door Taylor's wounds are explained without anyone inside firing. Stippling brackets standoff distance, not shooter location. Physics cannot separate the two hypotheses.
• Consciousness of guilt — the strongest strand, and it points somewhere else. Every distortion in the survivors' accounts runs in one direction: away from hiding and toward heroism. Not one of them conceals a shooting. A man who hid while his friends were murdered, and who then became the church's official historian, has an overwhelming and entirely ordinary reason to improve the story.

The dog that didn't bark

• Nobody outside ever said the shooting was wrong. Several mob members gave accounts. Not one hints at Mormons firing — and Webb, writing four months later while attacking Sharp, describes shooting through the door and a man falling.
• Five men stood trial for murder and never raised it. “The Mormons killed them themselves” would have been the greatest defence in American legal history. It was never offered. Grover boasted instead; Bilton confessed as he died.
• No powder residue, no burns. Barnes treated Taylor's wounds the next day. A man firing repeatedly in a small room with black powder is visibly and pungently marked.
• The plan makes no sense. Assassins who permit their target a six-shot revolver, allow a firefight, and take four balls themselves — while the actual beneficiary waits safely elsewhere.

Justin Griffin has said on camera that he could not prove it to a jury, and the expert he commissioned — given the full file for five months by a man hoping for the opposite answer — reconstructed it as a mob killing. Those two facts, from the two people who have looked hardest, are the most reliable summary available.

Part VIII

What Carthage actually proves

This site's argument is not about who fired. It is about whether the restored church met the conditions its own revelations attached to its blessings. Carthage bears on that argument at one point only — but it is a real point, and it is stronger for not requiring anyone to have committed murder.

What the martyrdom work establishes is narrower than a killing and more useful than one:

• The received account is demonstrably wrong on checkable points — the watch, the physics of Taylor's fall, one head wound rather than two, the panel shot excluded by every load tested, the volume of fire against the reload rate.
• The official telling has been revised repeatedly without acknowledgement — through Glen Leonard's history, the 2005 church film, Elder Holland's “pistol and ball” in October 2009, and Saints in 2018, which moved to a one-shot account and dropped the canonised mob figure in favour of the journal's.
• The man who controlled the historical record was improving his own part in it within weeks — and the church's own documentary editors now think he may have written the canonised announcement as well.

That last point is the one that travels. Willard Richards was Church Historian and Recorder. The compiled History of the Church passed through his hands and those of Thomas Bullock, Robert L. Campbell and Leo Hawkins — at Nauvoo in 1845–46 and Salt Lake City in 1854–55, after Joseph's death, under Brigham Young's administration. The Nauvoo press, the municipal court record, the manuscript history and the canon of 1844 were all in the hands of the men who won the succession.

None of which decides the covenant question. Whether D&C 84:54–57, 101, 104:4–5 and the untested appointed-time condition of 124:31–32 amount to a fall of the church or to correctable chastisement within a still-standing covenant is settled by the text and by the record of consecration, Zion and the Nauvoo temple — not by a door in Illinois. But it does establish how much weight the compiled history can bear when it is the only witness to itself. On this page's evidence, less than it has been asked to carry.

What would settle the open questions

1. A document placing a firearm in either survivor's hands at Carthage. This is the missing element. Without it the identification cannot be built no matter what else is found.
2. Test the dowel method itself. Fire known-angle shots through matched panels, dowel the holes, measure the deviation. Cheap, decisive either way, and it validates or retires the best geometric argument anyone has.
3. A discriminating geometry test — whether a chin-entry track produces distinguishable signatures from a doorway arm versus a shooter inside the room. The only test that could resolve rather than merely falsify.
4. Pull the mob-size documents and publish them side by side with images. Archival work requiring no ballistics, no permissions and no expert — and checkable by opponents.
5. Non-destructive scanning of the Carthage stone beneath the plaster for ball marks, and a CT of Hyrum's death mask. Neither requires anyone to accept any theory, and both produce evidence whichever way they come out.

Where to read the other side

This page disagrees with both of the positions that dominate the subject, so it owes links to each. It holds that the received account is materially false in specific, checkable ways — which the church's own scholarship largely does not concede — and that the identification of Taylor and Richards as the shooters is below probable cause, which is the whole point of the case against them. Read both and decide.

The case that the survivors did it

Justin Griffin's project is the reason most of the forensic work on this page exists. His films, articles and podcast are the fullest statement of the argument this page declines to reach.

• whokilledjosephsmith.com — the project's own site, with watch pages for both films and ten articles by Griffin and co-director Steve Sorensen, including one on John Taylor's watch and one on who was inside the room
• The WKJS Podcast on YouTube — Griffin's channel, and where the podcast episodes quoted on this page can be watched in full
• The documentaries: Who Killed Joseph Smith? Part 1 (2022) and Part 2: Redemption (2023), which carries the interview with the forensic detective he commissioned
• A long interview with Griffin and Sorensen at Hemlock Knots — the most accessible summary of the thesis in their own words

The case that the received account is sound

The traditional reconstruction is not merely institutional, and the best version of it is not a church manual but a peer-reviewed forensic study by faithful scholars.

• Lyon & Lyon, “Physical Evidence at Carthage Jail,” BYU Studies Quarterly 47:4 (2008) — free full text, and the anchor this page argues with rather than against. Their reconstruction of the door-panel shot is the strongest defence of the traditional account available
• Saints, ch. 44 · the church's Carthage Jail site history · Teachings of Presidents: Joseph Smith, ch. 46
• Road to Carthage, a Joseph Smith Papers podcast — eight episodes with transcripts; the last is a conversation with Dallin H. Oaks and Richard E. Turley Jr.
• Oaks & Hill, Carthage Conspiracy (University of Illinois Press, 1975) — the standard legal history of the 1845 trial. Its “conspiracy” is the documented one among Warsaw militia officers, not an inside job

The published criticism of Griffin

Two substantial critiques exist, and this page's reader should have them. Note that neither engages the ballistic replication in detail, which is the part of his work this page relies on most.

• Jana Riess, Religion News Service (2022)
• Hanna Seariac, Public Square — argues the film's underlying purpose is polygamy denial

The documents themselves

The best answer to all three positions is the primary record, and most of it is online and free.

• Joseph Smith Papers — Carthage, Illinois, the single best entry point · Richards's journal, 23–27 June 1844 · Taylor's account, written 23 Aug. 1856
• Dr Thomas Barnes to his daughter, 1 Nov. 1897 — the attending physician's own description of the wounds · William R. Hamilton's letter, 24 Dec. 1902
• Curtis Weber, “Skulls and Crossed Bones” — the forensic study of the 1928 exhumation · John Hay's 1869 article, full text, so the quotation this page withdraws can be checked by anyone
• The UMKC Famous Trials Carthage archive — trial account, eyewitness statements, defendant profiles and bibliography in one place