"The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state."
So ordered Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri on October 27, 1838-issuing one of the only government-sanctioned religious extermination orders in American history. Executive Order 44 remained legally valid until 1976.
But this isn't a story about religion. It's a story about money.
Through twenty-five voices-Mormon farmers and political advisors, slave owners and abolitionists, land speculators and shopkeepers, a vigilante sergeant and an Osage entrepreneur-Coming Out of the Water Dry reveals the economic machinery behind the persecution. The Mormons operated their own banks, ran their own stores, bought land as a collective, and didn't purchase whiskey, tobacco, or coffee. In frontier Missouri, that made them dangerous.
Follow the money, and the massacre makes sense. Banks that lost depositors. Merchants who lost customers. Land speculators who lost commissions. Politicians who saw voting blocs shifting. When economics masquerades as religious conflict, ordinary people become accomplices to atrocity.
Steve Levi's polyphonic narrative resurrects an American atrocity most Americans have never heard of-and reveals a pattern that echoes into our own time.
History is about money. Alexander the Great was the first one in recorded history to understand that. -Sister Elizabeth
