Joshua Romney and Dr. Eric Samuelsen, Theatre and Media Arts
“I am an apparition. An echo of events long since past. Burned into my frame are the stories, brutal deeds, and bloody failures to which I have been witness. October 30, 1838. Colonel Jennings of the Missouri State Militia orders an attack on the Mormon settlement at Haun’s Mill. Seventeen Mormons die, fourteen on the night of the massacre. Of the 240 militia members, not one life was lost. I come to you as a still whisper from the halls of the past, not as a definitive end, but the door to a new beginning.”
So begins Battle of the Mill, a stage play based on one of the most infamous tragedies in LDS history. January 2004 marked the preliminary research and development phase for the script through Eric Samuelsen’s TMA 351 Playwriting class. It was the heroic standoff of the Haun’s Mill refugees against the inhumane brutality of the Missouri Militia members that initially attracted me to this specific historical event. The script I planned on writing was centered on such a theme. But with further research, the rich complexities of history began to surface, changing the way I looked at the Haun’s Mill Massacre. Heroes developed flaws, villains developed logic, and ordinary men and women were stretched by the extremities of a nation violently attempting to define itself. As the narrator of the stage play comments, “…How could such an event be birthed? How could man and nature allow this heinous act? As we shall see, the causes are many, the effects all funneling to one vulgar point.”
To reflect this new-found point of view, I endeavored to split the play into three acts. The first act tells the story of the settlers at Haun’s Mill up to and through the first few seconds of the standoff. The second act returns to the beginning and tells the same story through the eyes of the Missourians who believed that, though their hands would be stained, exterminating the camp at Haun’s Mill was an act of State and national defense. The third act methodically recounts the massacre itself in uncensored detail. Finally, in order to create a cohesion of time and place, the mill itself acts as a phantom narrator for the story.
With the generous ORCA donation, I was able to organize a one-week research tour in order to personally visit many of the sites where the events from the play actually unfolded. Landing in Kansas City, on the far west side of Missouri, I had the opportunity to slowly wind my way through the state, visiting such relevant sites as Gallatin, Millport, Dewitt, Shoal Creek, and Crooked River. Additionally, visits to important LDS church history sites such as Liberty, Independence, Adam-Ondi-Ahman, Nauvoo, and Carthage lent a better understanding of the world of Church members in Missouri, 1840. Shoal Creek gently winds itself through the state, passing a nearly unmarked site in the middle of sprawling soybean fields. A broken cement plaque at the base of an old tree hallows the ground as the original site of the massacre at Haun’s Mill. Though the Mill has washed away, the building sites are indistinguishable, and the sepulcher of the slain still being searched for, I had the invaluable experience of camping for two days at the site of this great tragedy. During this time I had the opportunity to study the land and make rewrites of the script as I felt prompted. One example, of many, was the evening I spent camping on the banks of Shoal Creek. No amount of research I had done prepared me for the cold, damp, and hopelessly dark night that followed. I was moved beyond words to realize that on a night very similar to this, women dragged their weeping children from the cover of the wood line to paw through the bloody mass of moaning men and corpses in the hopes of finding a husband, brother, or father. This new insight was directly written into the script by the addition of a scene that attempts to mimic and recreate in the minds of the audience a distant flavor of that languishing night.
Following my return from Missouri and a series of rewrites, Battle of the Mill entered the Theatre Department’s WDA class (Writer-Director-Actor Workshop) Fall of 2004. Extensive peer and faculty review was capped by a performed reading of the script staged by the participants of the class. Drawing from the collective experiences provided by the Department of Theatre and Media Arts, the Office of Research and Creative Activities, and the students of WDA, I was able to complete a final rewrite of the script winter semester 2005. As the school year advances from Fall 2005 to Winter 2006, Battle of the Mill will be resubmitted to the Theatre Selection Committee to be considered for the following theatrical season.
The monetary donation provided by ORCA allowed me an invaluable research experience that has shaped the telling of the Haun’s Mill Massacre in a unique and incomparable way. As the narrator Mill comments at the end of the play, “Like the souls I carried with me, those who witness these events share my burden; for I now am etched into you as the epitaph at my site: In Memory of the Victims of Haun’s Mill Massacre October 30th 1838.”