October 27, 1838. The governor of Missouri signed an order saying a religious group in his state had to be exterminated or driven out. Three days later, militia killed eighteen people at a settlement called Haun's Mill, including an elderly man they shot after he had surrendered and a nine year old boy. The order was not formally rescinded until 1976. Mormons had started settling in Missouri in 1830, and the trouble started almost immediately. Some of it was religious hostility. Some was economic, because Mormon settlers arrived in organised groups, bought land together, and traded among themselves. Some was political, because they voted as a bloc, and in a state as closely divided as Missouri that made them a power. And a lot of it was the slavery question, since most Mormon settlers came from the north. They were driven out of Jackson County by mob violence in 1833 and resettled, and in 1836 the state created Caldwell County essentially as a place to put them. That held for about two years. In 1838 it broke down. On July 4, Sidney Rigdon gave a speech at Far West promising armed resistance to any further persecution, which was understandable after 1833 and was also read in the surrounding counties as a declaration of war. By that autumn there was open fighting, with raids and burnings running in both directions. Then Captain Samuel Bogart's state militia took Mormon hostages in northern Ray County, and an armed Mormon company rode out from Far West to get them back. That was the Battle of Crooked River. It was small, and men died on both sides. What reached the state capital was not what happened. The reports arriving in Jefferson City claimed Mormons had massacred Bogart's entire company, including men who had surrendered, and that an attack on Richmond was coming. None of that was true. On that basis, Governor Lilburn Boggs issued Executive Order 44. The wording is the reason it is remembered. He wrote that the Mormons had placed themselves in an attitude of open and avowed defiance of the laws, and directed that they must be exterminated or driven from the state. A necessary note on that word. In 1838 American usage, "exterminate" was often used to mean expel or root out rather than kill, and Boggs later claimed his aim had been to subdue the Mormons without bloodshed. Historians generally accept that the word was broader then than it is now. That said, he put it in a military order, to generals, with troops. General John B. Clark was ordered to Richmond to operate against them, with additional forces from other commanders. On October 30, militia from Livingston County rode into the settlement at Haun's Mill in eastern Caldwell County. The settlers had been negotiating a local truce and some had believed one was in place. The militia came in firing. Men and boys took shelter in the blacksmith's shop, which was the worst possible choice, because it had wide gaps between the logs and the attackers simply put their muskets through the gaps and fired into it. Eighteen people were killed. Thomas McBride, an elderly Revolutionary War veteran, surrendered his gun and was then killed with a corn knife. Sardius Smith, aged nine, was found hiding under the bellows and shot in the head, and the man who did it is reported to have said that nits make lice. The dead were buried the next day in an unfinished well, because the survivors were too few and too frightened to dig graves. Most scholars find little evidence the militiamen at Haun's Mill knew the order had been issued. One later account from 1877 has them citing it. Either way, the order and the massacre came from the same atmosphere within three days of each other. Far West surrendered on November 1. The terms were signed under duress and required handing over the leaders, the weapons and the land. Joseph Smith and others were taken prisoner and held through the winter. Clark addressed the surrendered population and told them they should expect extermination and that their leaders would not be coming back. He offered to let them stay until spring. Most left within about ten days anyway. Roughly 15,000 people crossed Missouri and the Mississippi into Illinois in winter, and founded Nauvoo. Boggs later sent Colonel Sterling Price to stop the continuing raids on Mormon property, but he never repealed the order. In 1842 somebody shot Boggs through the window of his home in Independence with a pistol loaded with buckshot. He survived. A Mormon named Porter Rockwell was charged and acquitted, and whether he did it has been argued over for 180 years. Executive Order 44 stayed formally on the books until June 25, 1976, when Governor Kit Bond rescinded it at a church gathering at Far West during the Bicentennial. 138 years, for a document that told an American state's militia to drive a religious minority out or wipe them out.