My father claimed that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, was a distant relative on his father’s side of the family. My aunt backed up his assertion, saying that our line of the family remained in Maine, while the prophet’s clan drifted from the mountains in Vermont to the religiously burned-over lands of Western New York. After announcing his discovery of the golden tablets of the Moroni, Joseph Smith formed the Latter Day Saints. Their belief in polygamy angered more conservative religionists and the Mormons were driven by angry mobs, but they didn’t go without a fight and the most infamous of their protector was Orrin Porter Rockwell.
The young convert served as bodyguard to the Prophet, who said to Porter at a Christmas party. “I prophesy, in the name of the Lord, that you — Orrin Porter Rockwell — so long as ye shall remain loyal and true to thy faith, need fear no enemy. Cut not thy hair and no bullet or blade can harm thee.”
According to Wikipedia the Mormon Samson earned a bloodthirsty reputation with an attempted assassination of Lilburn Boggs, the former governor of Missouri, who signed Executive Order 44 on October 27, 1838 known as the “Extermination Order” evicting Mormons from Missouri by violent and deadly means.
Old Port defended his murdering ways by saying, “I never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot!… He’s still alive, ain’t he?”
His former home is the site of the Utah State Prison.
He was no Taggard Romney.