Introductory
At the earnest request of many friends I have written this book with some incidents of my early life before coming to Beaver Island.
What I have written about the Mormons are my own personal experiences and what I knew about them by living constantly near them for four years of my life; our leaving the island and settling at Charlevoix for safety then our being driven from there. After the fight then my life in Traverse City and finally returning to Beaver Island again. After the Mormons were expelled my twenty-seven years’ residence at that time with the four first years gives thirty-one years of Beaver Island life with as much knowledge of Mormon life as any one outside of their teachings could possibly have. In this little history I have only touched lightly upon the reality, writing what my memory contained that might be interesting, telling the stories as near as possible as they were told to me by the people themselves that had lived and suffered by the Mormon doctrine; some things my parents told me when I was too young to remember, during the first part of my residence on “Beaver Island.”