The Battle of Crooked River occurred on October 25, 1838, during the 1838 Mormon War, a period of escalating tensions between Mormon settlers and non-Mormon residents of Missouri. Ray County was located immediately south of the Mormon-dominated Caldwell County, with the two counties separated by an unincorporated strip of land 24 miles long and 6 miles wide known as "Bunkham's Strip" or "Buncombe Strip." In early 1838, prominent leaders from the Latter Day Saint church, including David Whitmer, William W. Phelps, John Whitmer, and Oliver Cowdery, were excommunicated and fled Caldwell County, relocating their families to Richmond and Liberty, the county seats of Ray and Clay counties respectively. This relocation of excommunicated church members to neighboring counties heightened existing tensions between the Mormon and non-Mormon populations.
The immediate trigger for the battle was the capture of three Mormon captives taken from Caldwell County on October 24, 1838. In response, a Mormon rescue party led by David W. Patten formed to free these prisoners. On October 25, this rescue party clashed with a Ray County militia company commanded by Samuel Bogart in an area southeast of Elmira, Missouri. The engagement itself was characterized as a skirmish rather than a major pitched battle.
The consequences of this skirmish proved far-reaching and severe for the Mormon community in Missouri. Exaggerated reports of the battle reached Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs, who responded by issuing Missouri executive order 44. This executive order resulted in the forced expulsion of all Mormons from the state of Missouri, making the Battle of Crooked River a major escalator in the 1838 Mormon War and a pivotal moment that transformed local militia conflict into state-level religious persecution.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
49 Comanche killed; 2 US killed
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