Benjamin Brown's Future Suffering Foretold — Prophecy Fulfilled on Nova Scotia Mission

In the spring of 1843, about a year before the martyrdom of Joseph Smith, Elder Benjamin Brown and his companion Jesse W. Crosby departed Nauvoo on a mission to Nova Scotia, where Crosby's family and friends lived. After walking two hundred miles to Chicago, traveling by steamer across the Great Lakes to Buffalo and across Lake Ontario to Sackets Harbor, New York, the destitute elders waited out the winter with relatives until the St. Lawrence River cleared of ice. Before continuing their journey, they held a farewell meeting with the Saints there.

Brown recorded that "the Spirit of the Lord was greatly poured out" at the meeting, and that "a little boy stood up and spoke in tongues, the tears rolling down his face all the time. The interpretation stated that, after leaving that place, I should go to another, where I should be mobbed and left for dead, and that the blood should run down from my head on my clothes and the ground." Brown took the warning seriously and wrote that "by great caution, I kept clear of much that I might have suffered" — but the prophecy was still fulfilled to the letter.

After preaching at Montreal and being refused passage at Quebec, the elders made their way by canoe down the St. Johns River in New Brunswick. Opposition turned violent: false charges were brought before hostile magistrates, and only certificates from friendly justices — and a two-hour appeal before the provincial governor — stopped the legal proceedings. Enraged, their enemies determined to mob them. One mobber overheard Brown promise to visit a member after a preaching appointment, and with about ten others waylaid him in the darkness: "Some of them held me while the rest beat me about the head with their fists; but not being able to bruise me sufficiently in this manner, one of them took off one of my boots, and belabored me about the head with the heel of it, until I was covered with blood, which ran down onto my clothes and the ground." Several of his ribs were broken before he feigned death and was left for dead — the blood running down his head onto his clothes and the ground exactly as the tongue-speaking boy had interpreted months before.

That night the mob, discovering the elders alive, besieged the house where they slept, hurling a rail through the window onto their bed and planning to tar and feather the two men and sink them in the St. Johns River with stones tied to their feet; a woman of the household surprised them with a lighted candle and they fled. Brown recovered, completed his mission, and returned to Nauvoo in 1844. He later published the experience among his "testimonies for the truth," citing the prophecy received in tongues and its precise fulfillment as a witness that the ancient gifts of the gospel had been restored.