A Bullet Through His Coat: How Ellis Eames and His Family Were Preserved at Haun's Mill (1838)

Ellis Eames was born in 1809 at Mentor, Ohio. He joined the Church in Jackson County, Missouri, in 1834, and in 1835 set out on a mission with Joseph Holbrook and Lyman Gibbs. In 1837 he moved his family to Haun's Mill on Shoal Creek, Missouri, where he and Jacob Myers Jr. operated a grist mill upstream of the settlement.

On October 30, 1838, a mob fell upon the little settlement at Haun's Mill and fired into the brethren gathered at the blacksmith shop. Seventeen or more Latter-day Saints were killed in the massacre. Ellis Eames was among those present that afternoon — a bullet passed through his coat — yet he came through the attack without a wound, and his wife Olive Jane Gibbs Eames and their four children, all of whom were at the settlement, survived with him. The whole family of seven, living in the very place where the mob's fire was directed, was preserved.

Olive lived to write an account of the massacre for the historical record, published in 1896. The family later lived at Clay County, Missouri, and Nauvoo, Illinois.

In 1847 Ellis was enlisted in Brigham Young's Vanguard Company, riding in the Fourteenth Ten. He took sick on the trail in May, and by the crossing of the Platte the company's journals record him turning back: William Clayton wrote a letter for Heber C. Kimball "which was sent by Brother Ellis Eames who has concluded to go back on account of poor health." He returned to Winter Quarters, recovered, and reached the Salt Lake Valley by 1849.

In Utah he was elected the first mayor of Provo, serving from 1851 to 1852, and later moved to San Bernardino, California, where he served as district attorney. The coat pierced at Haun's Mill and the family preserved through it remained his quiet witness of that October afternoon in 1838, when nearly everything the mob aimed at was destroyed and his household was not.

Fuller account of this event (in the witness’s own words):

This dreadful massacre occurred October 30, 1838. There was quite a settlement of saints at Haun's mill, there being some dozen families or more. We had been living there a year or so prior to the cruel treatment the saints received during this massacre. He called to me as he passed, 'Have you all the children?' 'Yes,' said I, 'all four.' As Rial Ames fled he remarked, 'I guess Ellis's folks [that is myself and husband] are all murdered.' Isaac Laney crossed the creek above me. The mob saw him and began firing. I saw him fall, then rise and climb the hill.