Adam Lightner and Homer Duncan Smuggle a Keg of Powder Past Bayonets That Cannot Find It (1838)

In the fall of 1838, as mobs gathered around Far West, Missouri and drove off the Saints' stock, the defenders of the town had almost no gunpowder. Because Adam Lightner was not a member of the Church, the brethren sent him to Liberty for a keg of powder, with Homer Duncan riding along. On the return trip the two men hid the keg by rolling it in twenty yards of carpet inside a barrel, then filling the barrel with beans. Their wagon was stopped and searched twice by ten men, who thrust their bayonets again and again into the barrel of beans — and never once touched the powder. Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, whose husband made the trip, recorded that both men knew their lives hung on a thread and looked for death every moment. "But the Lord willed otherwise, and they arrived home safely to the joy of the brethren." Had the powder been found, she wrote, the two men would have been killed on the spot.